Rally Chile 2024 will be Janne Ferm’s last rally as a World Rally Championship co-driver, after announcing his retirement on the final day of the event.
Retirement had originally beckoned for Ferm at the end of the 2023 season but, when Esapekka Lappi moved to a part-time role at Hyundai, he was able to convince the 44-year-old to stay on for one more year.
Usually known for his voracious laughter, Ferm was more introspective at the finish of Rally Chile – which unfortunately was a did-not-finish, after Lappi spun on the penultimate stage and damaged the front end of his i20 N Rally1.
“I was thinking that I just quit and it’s not big of a deal but everybody is…,” he trailed off while speaking to DirtFish. “The rally family who was now just giving the hugs and cheers and everything, so now it has been an emotional day.
“It has been a journey, there is ups and downs and everything. Of course you can mention those two wins [Finland and Sweden], but still, all the families we are involved and everything like EP said and just the man who he is.
“It has been my privilege that I have been able to be there with him and he has been supporting me and in a way I have been supporting him as well. I have to thank him from the bottom of my heart.”
Ferm and Lappi have started 90 WRC events together
Lappi paid tribute to his long-time navigator and suggested they’d still pair up together in future, albeit in a non-professional driving context.
“First of all, I need to thank him for all these years,” said Lappi. “We’ve had 15 seasons together. I was a rookie when we started. We both were. We’ve climbed up the hill to be professionals for many years and now this journey comes to an end.
“I’m pretty sure we will sit together still at some point, you know, to do some funny stuff on the rally car, but not professionally. So, yeah, only positives and really thankful for him about it.”
“He’s been the loudest laugher of the pit. If you don’t know where he is, but you hear the laugh, you know he’s present somewhere nearby. And it doesn’t even need to be nearby, because you can hear it far away. But yeah, I’m sure we all will miss his jokes, his sense of humour.”
Ferm isn’t hanging up his co-driver’s helmet entirely: he will sit alongside Heikki Kovalainen for next month’s RallyLegend in San Marino aboard a Citroën C3 WRC.
Ferm and Lappi first competed together 15 years ago
But beyond that, Ferm has no plans for what comes next: “I don’t know,” he said. “Everybody asking that!
“One of the guys said that; do you have a plan B? I said, I don’t have a plan B. I don’t have a plan C. I just quit this and then I will see what will come up.”
Ferm sat alongside Esapekka Lappi for his entire WRC career, which spanned 90 events over 14 years. Together they won the WRC2 title in 2016 for Škoda and two WRC rallies: their home event, Rally Finland, in 2017 and Rally Sweden earlier this season.
The pair’s first event together was a year prior to their first WRC outing, joining forces at the 2010 Arctic Lapland Rally in the Finnish national championship’s SM2 class. In total they have sat together in rallies on 147 occasions across all competitions globally.
