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Finnish WRC2 driver Kalle Rovanperä behind the wheel.
© Jaanus Ree
WRC
Get to know a future star of the World Rally Championship
Find out how Kalle Rovanperä became one of motorsport’s most exciting young talents before he even passed his driving test.
Written by Justin Hynes
8 min readPublished on
There's an old adage in motorsport that if you’re good enough, you're old enough – sporting shorthand for an insistence that drivers, no matter how young, should be afforded the opportunity to fuse precocious gifts with craft and guile as soon as enough heads have been turned by their raw talent. Think four-time Formula One champion Sebastian Vettel being parachuted into the sport at the age of 19 and becoming its youngest winner two years later. Or Max Verstappen carving more than two years off that benchmark at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.
Now there's a new name to add to that prodigiously talented list: Kalle Rovanperä. Instead of the world of circuit racing however, the Finnish wunderkind's skills are being exhibited at the wheel of a rally car.
Until recently, few beyond the rutted paths and muddy tracks of low-key eastern European national rally championships were aware of the teenage driver, but he was always destined for success.
The son of former World Rally Championship star Harri Rovanperä – a works driver for Ford, SEAT, Peugeot, Mitsubishi and finally Škoda – Rovanperä was born just four months shy of his father's one and only WRC win, at the 2001 Swedish Rally. It wasn’t long before the youngster took to four wheels, first on quad bikes and motorcycles and later in karts. However, his first experience of a real-world rally car, at just eight-years-old, changed everything.
Rovanperä's precocious gifts are amply displayed in a video of his efforts at the wheel of an ageing but still agile Toyota Starlet rally car. The footage shows the eight-year-old peering through the steering wheel from a raised seat. His tiny feet dab at specially extended pedals as he expertly slides the rally car around icy roads and through forest tracks near the family's Jyväskylä home. Uploaded to YouTube, the clip promptly went viral.
Kalle Rovanperä in his M-Sport Ford Fiesta R5 at the Wales Rally GB in 2017.
Rovanperä on the move in an M-Sport Ford Fiesta R5© Jaanus Ree
"I don't really remember too much about it, I was so young," says Rovanperä, as if discussing a long-forgotten childhood diversion. "Honestly, I have no idea where that connection [with the car] came from. I'd been driving all kinds of other stuff when I was little – ATVs and bikes and things like that – but I didn't drive a car until I was seven. So I have no real idea why it felt so easy; it just did. I have no explanation, but right from the first moment, that car felt so good. After driving a rally car for the first time, I never touched any other racing cars."
By the age of 13, Rovanperä had graduated to competition. "There wouldn't be any sense in just driving," he explains. "You either go flat out or you do something else." But arenas in which the youngster could legally compete were hard to come by. Too young for the roads of his homeland, he instead turned to nearby Latvia, where no road licence is required for rallies.
"It was difficult to convince people that I could compete, that I was good enough," he says. "My father had to ask for permissions in Latvia and Estonia. For me, going into rallying so young wasn't difficult, because I'd driven a lot before that. I don't really know what other people thought about me beforehand, but afterwards I think they thought I was kind of OK."
This last comment is delivered with trademark understatement. Though he was only allowed to compete on special stages, with his father's old co-driver Risto Pietiläinen piloting the teenager on the public road sections, Rovanperä won the two-wheel-drive open championship.
Kalle Rovanperä reparing for the first stage of the Wales Rally GB 2017, his first ever WRC event.
Preparing for the first stage of the Wales Rally GB© Jaanus Ree
Rovanperä stepped up in 2015, competing first in a Škoda Fabia S2000, then in an R5 variant. The results were staggering. In the Latvia Rally Sprint he won at the first time of asking, claiming all eight stages on the Rally Alūksne. In the Latvian Rally Series, at the Rally Liepāja – also a round of the European Rally Championship – Rovanperä's stage times were a match for event winner Ralfs Sirmacis, also driving a Fabia R5.
That, though, was just the start. The championship itself soon followed and, with five wins from eight events, Rovanperä was crowned champion, 21.5 points ahead of nearest rival, Jānis Vorobjovs, a driver almost three times his age. "Latvia was really important for me," says Rovanperä. "I learned everything I know about rallying there. Car control was OK for me before that, but everything else – how an event works, everything you have to do, how to deal with pace notes – all that I had to learn."
The 15-year-old's showings in the relative backwater of the Latvian championship, along with standout performances in Finland – thanks to special permissions from the country’s national motorsports body – and in Italy began to build towards Rovanperä's head-turning moment, the tipping point at which the gaze of WRC teams began to swing his way. 
Last May, Rovanperä secured the support of Red Bull, at the same age the company signed Verstappen, and then last summer, Toyota WRC team boss Tommi Mäkinen gave Rovanperä his first taste of the top rank. He tested Toyota's 2017 Yaris WRC car in a 40km endurance run, a feeling he described as "incredible" and which Mäkinen, a four-time World Rally Championship winner, branded as "good, very good."
Rovanperä's first step on the world stage would come courtesy of Malcolm Wilson, though, the boss of current WRC champions M-Sport and a man who has a track record of promoting youth, having overseen the rise of another Finnish rally star, Jari-Matti Latvala, from 17-year-old prodigy to youngest-ever WRC event winner at just 22. Rovanperä would be next, with the then 16-year-old booked to drive an R5 Fiesta in the penultimate round of the 2017 WRC campaign, the Wales Rally GB. There was just one problem: to compete on the open roads, he'd have to meet the altogether more prosaic requirement of owning a driving licence.
So, on October 2, 2017, the day after he turned 17 and just over three weeks before his WRC debut, Rovanperä idled a family car around his hometown in pursuit of what could turn out to be the most valuable trophy of his young career. "Was there pressure? Maybe a little bit," he says. "Quite a few things were dependant on getting my licence – the Wales Rally GB being a major one. But in the end it was easy. No problem at all."
Teenage rally driving phenomenon Kalle Rovanperä with his father, Harri Rovanperä, who also drove in the WRC.
Kalle with his father, Harri Rovanperä, who also drove in the WRC© Jaanus Ree
His WRC debut was a different story. Perhaps for the first time in his career, Rovanperä came up against challenges that taxed his innate skills to the fullest. His times were solid – there were third places on Stages 15 and 21 – but a placement of 15th overall in the WRC2 category left Rovanperä cold. "I definitely wasn't satisfied," he says. "The most difficult thing was just adjusting to a new car. Also, I was driving with Michelin tyres and I haven't driven them for five years. So when you put those things together, it was pretty difficult, a very steep learning curve."
The competition, too, was at a level Rovanperä hadn't encountered before. "It’s a WRC event, so every guy there is fast, I know that, he says. "But it's much better to come up against people at that level. It's good to be pushed out of your comfort zone and stretched.
"I'm quite strict about my own performances," he adds. "Other people insist I demand too much from myself, but I can't understand why I shouldn't be that critical. A bad result is never good enough. Good results are the only ones I'm looking for."
As for 2018, Rovanperä has confirmed he'll be driving for for Skoda in WRC2, a move which makes him the youngest factory driver in the World Rally Championship. There are rumours he could drive in a limited number of WRC rounds as well, but he's still too young too compete in all of them. Rovanperä is undeterred, though, and has set his sights on beating Jari-Matti Latvala's youngest winner record.
"Malcolm Wilson did a really good job with Jari-Matti. He came in at the same age as me and did well," says Rovanperä. "I have five years to beat Jari-Matti’s record so within five years I hope I'll have won in WRC."
In the mouths of many, this might smack of hubris. But when it's uttered by a sportsman for whom transcendent gifts appear to come as easily as a flick of a handbrake in an ageing Starlet, it simply sounds like the inevitable shape of things to come. And now Kalle Rovanperä has licence to make it happen.
This article is taken from the February 2018 issue of The Red Bulletin. To get the new issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe here.
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