Think of the World Rally Championship in Washington and your mind will almost inevitably wander to that epic era-ender in the winter of 1986.
It’s understandable. Peugeot versus Lancia; Kankkunen versus Alén. All run under the classic Pacific Northwest December rain. It was a rally worthy of its billing, complete with penalties, a botched battery change, one winner and, apparently, two world champions.
Then the sun came out. Group B said goodnight and the WRC went to court.
While the world caught its breath, one Finn handed the world title to another and the sport came to terms with a new regime. Just six months on from that incredible conclusion to 1986, the world championship returned to Washington (and dived into Seattle’s Golden Gardens – the only WRC stage ever to run through the city), yet America’s participation in the first two years of Group A remained largely overshadowed by the end of the supercar story.
Kankkunen (right) finished second in Olympus 1986, but ended up becoming world champion 11 days later
A calendar shake-up shifted Olympus forward in the schedule, with June replacing the weeks before Christmas. Toyota returned to Seattle in 1987, still dependent on big power through the rear wheels, but with the Celica Twincam Turbo confined to Group B history, Björn Waldegård and Lars-Erik Torph were handed a Group A Supra apiece.
Predictably, neither found the weighty straight six, three-liter engine machine particularly suitable to the Washington woods. Big Björn was 18 minutes down in sixth, while Torph’s engine let go on the Smith Creek stage north of Raymond.
That was the last time Toyota Team Europe ventured to Tacoma.
Nissan added a further European-Japanese dimension to the 1987 event, bringing a trio of 200SXs for Mikael Ericsson, Shekhar Mehta and Per Eklund. Ericsson’s car suffered an engine failure while the other two finished eighth and ninth respectively.
The European force which hit a Stateside sweet spot was Lancia. After that brawling 1986 win (Alén’s S4 defeating Kankkunen’s 205 T16), the Delta HF delivered in 1987. Five Group A cars were flown west out of northern Italy, two of which were run by Jolly Club (for Jorge Recalde and Paolo Alessandrini) and all of them finished in the top seven.
Lancia was the only manufacturer to win Olympus in the WRC
The podium was an all-Martini affair, with Kankkunen eclipsing his second place in December to take a win in June. Success for the then defending world champion came as no surprise – if an eyebrow was raised, it was at the day-two speed shown by American debutant Miki Biasion.
Two minutes down on the leading sister car of Alén, the Italian-flagged Lancia galloped to fastest time after fastest time to reel his team-mate in by the time the cars arrived in Westport. Moving ahead, Biasion was confident he had this one, only for a plug lead to come loose, with the resulting misfire costing him half a minute to second-placed Kankkunen on stages 23 and 24.
With a lead over its nearest non-Lancia rival now being measured with the use of a calendar, Lancia team manager Nini Russo dictated the winner would be declared after SS25 (19 stages from the end). Kankkunen was ahead; Biasion deeply frustrated and 12 seconds behind.
Those frustrations were eased 12 months on, when he delivered a confident victory ahead of a second works (albeit run by Jolly Club) car for Alex Fiorio. Maximum manufacturer points sealed the title for the Italian marque with just seven rounds completed – a record for the WRC.
Unable to pique the interest of the local population in a way rallying could on the more southerly America’s two continents, the United States’ WRC round was withdrawn. The world championship hasn’t been back for 37 years.
The 1988 Olympus Rally was the last world championship round to be held in the US
Talk to any of the drivers involved back in the day and there was genuine enthusiasm for the roads around Washington. In the wet, they were an RAC-Finland combination, but when it dried out there were notes of an Acropolis-New Zealand cross. And there was no shortage of commitment from the organizers.
Just weeks before the start of that 1988 event, much of the Weyerhaeuser Forest complex mileage went south when a sponsor pulled out. Unperturbed, the volunteers re-wrote great swathes of the roadbook to take the event back to the roads north of Lake Narwhatzel and not far from the action this week.
The route might have been parred back by a day or two, but today’s roads present precisely the same challenge that sat before Kankkunen and Biasion close on four decades ago. The Olympus Rally remains the pride of the Pacific Northwest and very much a rally with more than a single season of world championship history.
