Henri Toivonen
Rallying ran through the family. His father Pauli had won the Monte Carlo, the 1000 Lakes, and the Acropolis. He became European Rally Champion in 1968. Henri grew up inside that world. He did not inherit caution.
Before Lancia
Henri Toivonen was born in Jyväskylä in 1956, the heartland of Finnish rallying. Talbot signed him for 1980. The car was a Sunbeam Lotus. Rear-wheel drive. Naturally aspirated. In November, just after his twenty-fourth birthday, he won the Lombard RAC Rally outright. He became the youngest driver ever to win a World Rally Championship round. The following season he helped Talbot secure an unlikely manufacturers' championship. Then the program ended.
What followed was not a straight ascent. Opel for 1982 and 1983. The Ascona 400, then the Manta 400. Both rear-wheel drive. Neither carrying enough power to challenge the turbocharged machines that were beginning to dominate. He could lead rallies in cars that should not have been leading. He could also retire from rallies he was leading. Immense speed. Fragile consistency.
Lancia
In 1985, Lancia offered Toivonen the seat in their new Group B machine. The Delta S4 was unlike anything before it. A 1.8-litre four-cylinder engine driven by both a supercharger and a turbocharger in sequence. The supercharger delivered immediate response at low revs. The turbo took over as boost built. The combination eliminated the hesitation that defined other turbocharged rally cars. Power was roughly 500 horsepower. All four wheels received it.
Where earlier Lancia rally cars had relied on balance and precision to compensate for limited traction, the Delta S4 combined mid-engine weight distribution with permanent all-wheel drive. It was the successor to the 037 in name only. The architecture was entirely new. The philosophy had changed. Lancia were no longer defending rear-wheel drive. They were building the fastest Group B car they could.
Toivonen and the Delta S4 debuted at the 1985 RAC Rally. He won. The car's first competitive event. Lancia team boss Cesare Fiorio later said Toivonen was the only driver who could use nearly one hundred per cent of what the Delta S4 offered. Other drivers in the team were fast. Toivonen operated somewhere beyond fast. He carried speed into sections where others hesitated and found grip where the car should not have had any.
He opened the 1986 season by winning the Monte Carlo Rally with co-driver Sergio Cresto. On ice and snow, through the mountain stages above Monaco, the Delta S4 was devastating and Toivonen was at the centre of it. The performance confirmed what many in the paddock already believed. He was the fastest driver in rallying. The championship was his to take.
Corsica
On the second of May, 1986, during the eighteenth stage of the Tour de Corse, Toivonen's Delta S4 left the road at a tight left-hand corner. The car fell into a ravine. There were no spectators at the corner. No witnesses. The composite bodywork and the ruptured fuel tank meant that by the time anyone reached the site, there was almost nothing left. Henri Toivonen and Sergio Cresto were both killed.
Within hours, FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre announced the cancellation of Group B at the end of the season. The era that had produced the fastest and most spectacular rally cars ever built was over.
What Remained
Three WRC victories. One hundred and eighty-five stage wins. A manufacturers' championship delivered for Talbot in machinery that had no right to claim one. A speed that contemporaries described not as reckless but as operating in a place beyond what others could reach.
Toivonen was twenty-nine years old. He had been a factory rally driver for six seasons. He had spent most of them in cars that were not fast enough. When he finally had a machine equal to his ability, the combination lasted five months.
The Race of Champions, created two years later by Michèle Mouton and Fredrik Johnsson, was founded in his memory.
