With Tommi Mäkinen just announced as Toyota’s team manager, here are the firm’s greatest drivers.
Toyota are coming back to the World Rally Championship. This we’ve known for a while. The Japanese company’s return surfs on the wave of positivity created by big names likeVolkswagen and Hyundai re-joining the championship in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
Toyota won’t turn up until 2017, and will be using their Yaris, which has already been tested in the wilds of Finland, Germany and, er, Belgium. But big news came last week with the announcement that four-time World Rally Champion Tommi Mäkinen would be Toyota's team principal. This is a good thing.
Mäkinen will be helming a team who, through different incarnations, rocked the WRC from 1974 up until 1999. A number of the greatest drivers in rally history (notable exceptions being one Tommi Mäkinen!) passed through Toyota’s ranks during that time, doing battle in Celicas, Supras and Corollas – here are five of the best...
1) Carlos Sainz
Carlos Sainz is a three-time World Rally Champion. Or rather, he would have been if his Toyota Corolla hadn’t packed up 700m from the finish line of the 1998 Rally GB, gifting the championship, ironically, to Tommi Mäkinen. Sainz’s co-driver Luis Moya was so pissed off that he launched his helmet through the Corolla’s window…
But Toyota also gave King Carlos his two actual World Rally Titles in 1990 and 1992 – so it wasn’t all bad!
Watch Carlos' infamous end to his 1998 season in the video below.
2) Juha Kankkunen
Son of an ice racer, owner of a moustache and the man who earlier this year set the tractor speed record (it was 130kmh, in case you’re interested), Juha Kankkunen won the last of his four World Rally Championships with Toyota in 1993 behind the wheel of a Celica, having driven Toyotas in fits and bursts throughout his highly-decorated career.
3) Didier Auriol
Toyota were on a roll in the mid-90s, and one year after Kankkunen’s 1993 title for Toyota, Didier Auriol repeated the feat in his own Celica. After Toyota were disqualified and turfed out of the WRC for 12 months in 1995 following the discovery of a naughty system that allowed the team to effectively turn off their engines’ air restrictors, Auriol returned with the team in 1998, taking two more wins for Toyota.
4) Hannu Mikkola
The only rally driver to ever have a post-punk song written about him – Half Man, Half Biscuit’s ‘Architecture And Morality, Ted And Alice’, featuring the line: “The wonderful dexterity of Hannu Mikkola/Makes me want to shake hands with the whole of Finland” – Mikkola was Toyota’s way into the World Rally Championship in 1974, with the Finn campaigning a Corolla and scoring Toyota’s breakthrough win at Finland’s 1000 Lakes Rally in 1975.
5) Björn Waldegård
While more famous for his exploits in Ford Escorts, Björn Waldegård was another Super-Scandi that Toyota hit up back in the 1970s when it was beginning its rally programme. ‘Walle’ drove both a Corolla and a Celica with limited success, but returned to the marque in the 1980s, taking three Safari Rally wins – including his 1990 victory, which earned him the dubious honour of being the oldest ever WRC victor.
And a sixth…sort of
Back in 2000, Sébastien Loeb was given the chance to drive a top-level Toyota Corolla WRC entered by the French sporting association, the FFSA, at two rounds of the World Rally Championship. Loeb wouldn’t become a full-time Citroën driver until three years later, and no-one really remembers his Corolla outings in France and Italy next to his 78 WRC victories and nine world titles. But the history books show that Toyota was the only other manufacturer Loeb drove for in his illustrious career, so there!
via redbull.com
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