Hannu Mikkola has helped write the Audi quattro Sport E2 into the legend of Rally Finland. On Friday night, I’d like to think I might have helped do a similar job. In a similar car.
Granted, the 1983 world champion might have raised the bar in the infamous Ouninpohja with an out-of-body run through arguably the world’s fastest and most feared stage… but I was taking on the Harju stage and my E2 had closer to 800bhp.
And it was raining. It was, in fact, pouring.
I might be overplaying my part slightly. I did indeed tackle the 10th stage of this year’s Rally Finland and I was indeed in one of the most iconic Audis ever built. But I was on the right-hand side.
Secto boss Matias Henkola was doing the driving. I was doing the watching.
The opportunity to sit alongside the man who is singlehandedly doing more to make rallying sustainable than possibly anybody else in the sport was too good to miss.
Until it started raining. Then I could have been persuaded to miss it.
But ultimately, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Just firing up the five cylinders was enough to stop the centre of Jyväskylä in its tracks. The Audi brought faces to windows and smiles to faces. Some remembered 38 years ago, when Mikkola had come within a second of posting fastest time on the same Harju stage. They pointed to the Secto-branded quattro and told tales of wonder about the legend of that car.
With every head turned, Matias nosed the car towards the start. A man stepped out to guide us to the line. On the board were simple words: ‘Good luck on the race. We miss Craig.’
The Irishman himself would have loved this moment, the questions would no doubt have flowed when I told him of my run through Harju.
The quattro would have fascinated Craig in the same way it struck fear into me as we left the line. Splashing our way down to the first hairpin left and Henkola tugs on one of two vertical levers probably not present when Hannu was hammering these same city streets.
This Audi has a modern twist in the shape of a handbrake which locks the rear wheels. And the turbo from a drag racing engine.
Predictably with a barn door-sized blower, there’s nothing until 5000rpm, but after that there’s enough power and torque to stop the world from spinning.
As well as loving the sound and fury of this most aggressive of Group B cars, I loved the chance to see the stage from inside the cockpit. Harju might be a touch shorter than the famous-named gravel roads which surrounded us, but there’s still plenty of fame and fever to be had between the houses and on the road up to the church.
And that was where things got a bit more interesting.
Running Pirelli’s soft gravel tire for the stage, I wondered what would happen when we hit the loose surface halfway up the hill. My prediction was a ton of wheelspin and not much on the way of forward motion.
Shows what I know.
I noticed Matias fiddling with a button on the steering wheel as the surface change approach. And when we did get the mud beneath our wheels, the thing just flew.
I’d never imagined the hill was so steep. Or that internal combustion could power anything up such an incline at what felt like warp factor 10. It was on the loose that Henkola’s absolute mastery of the machine came into its own. It bucked and danced as he attempted to scrub speed and persuade it across kerbs and through corners.
“You really have to make the car slide,” he said. “This is why we’re using the gravel tires, we can move it around a bit more and get it turned in to corners.”
That much was obvious. At a time when I would definitely have been off the throttle, my man to the left was hard on the gas getting the turbo spinning, breaking mother earth’s grip on us and using all 800 horses to manoeuvre the car across the road.
All too soon, we were done and it was time to take the car back to service.
The last few minutes had brought history to life. It was 1985 again. And in heading back to the ’80s, Matias is futureproofing the sport we love.
The fuel and the lubricants in the quattro were all fossil-free. The four-foot flames shooting out of the straight pipes behind me were all made in an entirely sustainable fashion.
Getting out of the car, fans from the stage sought me out and wanted to shake my hand. Standing in my overalls in the middle of Rally Finland, I felt something of a fraud as I accepted their congratulations on being the reason their child had seen something they would never forget.
Nodding towards said child, one proud parent told me: “He stood there and stared. Just stared. When you took the next gear and the flames came, he jumped into the air. And the noise was scaring him so much he was crying.
“But look now…”
Standing in front of the Audi in service, he was staring again. Staring and grinning.
His father aimed some Finnish at his son. His son turned to me and answered.
The translation: “I want to be a rally driver. It’s my dream.”
