1986 Monte Carlo Rally: How Henri Toivonen won with a Lancia 'shaped like a banana'

The Italian team boss had watched Henri mature into a world class driver and blossom into the WRC’s hottest prospect. Come 1985, Fiorio decided the time was right to bring him into the Lancia fold.

“When he arrived, he changed everything in a better way – he really was fantastic.”

The younger Toivonen had taken a breakthrough win at the 1980 RAC Rally, but then had to wait almost exactly five years for his next.

The results with Lancia immediately started to come when Toivonen joined the Turin team for a part-time debut season, limited due to the fact that the Finn broke three vertebrae in his neck due to a crash early on in the year. A sixth in Monte Carlo, fourth in Finland and third in San Remo, all at the wheel of a two-wheel-drive Lancia 037, showed a promising upward trend though.

Then came the Lancia Delta S4.

The Italian squad had finished the 1985 championship a distant third to Peugeot and Audi, who fielded 205 T16 E2s and Audi Sport Quattro S1s respectively, each 4WD.

Lancia spent the season developing its first 4WD car, and the resultantly rapid Delta S4 was a match made in heaven with Toivonen. The young Finn also had single-seater racing aspirations at one point, and some of the race track-tested technical features of the astounding S4 meant that car and driver suited each other down to the ground.

“We were doing track racing with the Beta Monte Carlo, LC1 and LC2,” remembers Fiorio. “Circuit racing was giving a lot of better ideas to the technicians that were preparing rally cars. The experience gathered from the track helps you sophisticate a lot of things like fuel consumption, brakes, etc. I think also the drivers [like Toivonen] could use the performance needed on the track, and bring it into rallying.”

Lancia had put as much resource as possible into this car. The budget of their rally and race team was rumoured to be 10billion lire (£426,000) a year by 1986.

This carried-over technology from Lancia’s sports car prototypes efforts helped accelerate the S4’s development – literally: 550bhp channeled through 4WD certainly gave it some shift.

“The level to which we had developed the S4 was something absolutely incredible. It took 2.8 seconds to go from zero to 100 kilometres an hour, which was the performance of an F1 car,” says Fiorio. “Toivonen was the only driver that could use all the potential of this car.”

BBC Grandstand coverage of that year’s event (with Murray Walker commentating, naturally) shows numerous Group B competitors taking fairly sensible lines into one particular corner on SS1.

Then comes Toivonen, the Finn announcing himself by half-taking out a snowbank with his S4’s rear end as he appears to enter a right hander at an almost 90 degree angle, seemingly 20mph faster than anyone else.

In analysing such speed, Toivonen’s brother Harri backed up Fiorio’s opinion on Toivonen’s confidence and ‘at-oneness’ with the S4, in an interview for WRC.com.

“I spoke with Markku Alén and Miki Biasion, they said that Henri was the only person that could extract everything from the S4,” said Harri.

“I love to say he was the best. But he was also the bravest.”

So Toivonen was proving in his supercharged and turbocharged S4, pulling out an advantage of 1min 40sec over Audi’s Röhrl – until it all came to a sudden halt on the public roads between SS12 and 13.

As the Finn made his way from one stage to the next, a spectator’s car lost control and smashed head on into the Lancia. The damage was not insignificant, the S4 losing a wheel and having a badly bent chassis, as well as considerable amount of destroyed bodywork. Lancia mechanics feverishly managed to do just enough, including holding the front end together with octopus ties, so that the Finn could hobble off to the next time control.

“We didn’t have time to fix it completely,” remembers Fiorio. “We only had a few minutes at every service park – five minutes here, five minutes there. The car was still working and he was able to continue, but the S4 was not able to give the maximum performance.

“At every service park, we were repairing little by little.”

Salonen enjoyed the lead for five stages, but come the closing leg of the rally, held at night, Toivonen was ready, having mastered the nuances of a car which Lancia were still repairing stage by stage.

50,000 rabid rally fans lined the famous Col de Turini pass to see the climax of a thrilling rally – a demonstration of all that was sublime, beautiful and terrifying in Group B rallying. As it turned out, Toivonen mauled his fellow Finn.

Neck and neck for the first two stages, a poor tyre choice on SS30 left Salonen 48sec adrift. Combined with Toivonen’s searing pace, there was nothing Peugeot’s man could do.

“He really made the last night of Monte Carlo at the maximum speed,” says Fiorio, “And to get back into first was incredible, if we think how much time is lost because of this accident.”

Toivonen was ruthless, emerging from the final stage to win the 1986 Monte Carlo Rally with an advantage of over 4 minutes. There was no doubt who was the fastest man in rallying.

The Finn’s father, Pauli, wasn’t just proud of his son’s win, he was also relieved. Pauli had reluctantly taken the Monte Carlo win himself twenty years earlier when the four cars ahead of him were dubiously disqualified for a headlight infringement. As the elder T put it, “the name of Toivonen had finally been cleared”.

The rest of ‘86 WRC season promised much for Lancia and its Flying Finn.

“The performance Henri did was absolutely fantastic. Therefore, we thought that he could become world champion,” says Fiorio. “And also Lancia could become again world champion, as [had] happened many times already.”

Sadly, it would not be with Toivonen who, as is well documented, lost his life at the age of 29 in a fiery crash suffered whilst hustling the S4 Delta round Corsica at the San Remo Rally later that year.

What position was he in at the time? First, of course – by 3 minutes.