Ari Vatanen in the Peugeot 405 T16 Pikes Peak

WRC

Ride onboard with Rally’s greatest Flying Finns

With Rally Finland starting this week, buckle up for a thrill ride with the country’s best drivers.

Written by Greg Stuart

4 min readPublished on 02.08.2016 · 9:58 UTC

Finland is well known for its incredible driving talent. Of the eight Finnish F1 drivers who've started a grand prix, three have become world champions (Keke Rosberg, Mika Hakkinen and Kimi Räikkönen) while in the World Rally Championship, Finns still lead the way in number of victories, with Finnish drivers having claimed 170 wins to France's 166.

With Rally Finland kicking off this week, RedBull.com takes a look at the best rally drivers the country has produced.

Ari Vatanen

Check out the Climb Dance film above, from Ari Vatanen's 1988 Pikes Peak run, to see a true master at work.

Vatanen was also widely acknowledged to be the fastest driver of the World Rally Championship's fearsome Group B era in the 1980s. The 1981 champion often sailed close to the limit of what was possible in a rally car, sometimes getting away with it – see below from 1:58 for the famously bum-clenching moment at the 1983 Manx Rally where Vatanen manages to straighten up his Opel Manta just before passing through a narrow gap (and listen to co-driver Terry Harryman's reaction!) – and sometimes not, with Vatanen's crash at the 1985 Rally Argentina in his Peugeot 205 T16 almost costing the Finn his life.

Juha Kankkunen

The son of a Finnish ice racer, Juha Kankkunen remains one of the WRC's most successful ever drivers, and the only man to win four WRC titles for three different manufacturers: Peugeot, Lancia and Toyota.

Following the end of Group B in 1986 – the year that Kankkunen claimed his first crown – Kankkunen went on to excel in the lesser-powered Group A cars, which needed to be driven harder to extract the maximum performance from them. Titles came in 1987 and 1991 for Lancia, before his final championship for Toyota in 1993. An outing for Ford at Rally Finland in 2010 aside, Kankkunen finished his WRC career in 2002 with 23 WRC wins to his name.

Kankkunen with Toyota team boss Ove Andersson
© DPPI

Tommi Mäkinen

Tommi Mäkinen – no relation to Timo – had a largely unremarkable career in the WRC from 1987 to 1995, collecting just one win and one podium. Then out of the blue, from 1996 to 1999, the quiet Finn went win-crazy!

Signed as a Mitsubishi works driver for the 1995 season, the following year Mäkinen won five out of nine rallies to take his first title, with three more championships following consecutively after that. Having nearly been one of rallying's also-rans, Mäkinen's late-90s blitz on the WRC has left him as one of the undisputed legends of the sport.

Tommi Mäkinen in 1996, the year of his first title
© DPPI

Timo Mäkinen

With rallying in the ascendancy in the 1960s, the British Motor Corporation's Competition Manager Stuart Turner hit on an idea that would have a profound effect on the sport: 'If you want to win, get a Finn'. Turner realised that Finns had grown up driving on ice and gravel, and duly set about finding the country's best drivers to put in his team's Minis.

The first real superstar Turner found was Timo Mäkinen, a man so talented that at the 1967 1000 Lakes Rally, he set the third fastest time through the legendary Ouninpohja stage despite having to drive with his head half stuck out of the side window after the leather straps holding down his Mini's bonnet broke. See below for this incredible spectacle.

Jari-Matti Latvala

Forty years on from Stuart Turner's decision to stick Finns in his cars, Ford showed that the same method held true in rallying's modern era, using a succession of Finns in the 2000s, including Marcus Grönholm, Mikko Hirvonen and Toni Gardemeister.

Arguably the fastest, though, was the prodigiously talented Jari-Matti Latvala. Latvala began his WRC career in 2002 aged just 17, and became a full-time Ford factory driver in 2007. Ten wins have followed, with Latvala, having switched to Volkswagen in 2013, currently battling with team-mate Sébastien Ogierfor the 2014 title. Though Ogier may be the more complete driver, people in the know reckon that Latvala, in terms of pure speed, is the fastest driver currently racing in the WRC.