There were no rally cars, as such, during the sport’s first 50 years or so, just the bog standard daily transport people drove to work and back each day. Many car owners joined motor clubs, which organized boring regularity runs, manoeuvrability gymkhanas and navigational exercises. So for over 50 years, rallying was a series of docile tests of amateur driving skill.
Three things changed all that. The Second World War, which left behind a much more sophisticated road system; post-war production of better, more advanced cars; and the Scandinavians’ invention of special stages, where the name of the game was speed.
Wham! The whole thing took off to become the mind-blowing spectator sport it is today with a world TV audience of around 820 million in 190 countries.
OK, it wasn’t quite that fast or comprehensive, but by the late ’50s the pedal was on its way down to the metal.
Rallying became official in 1957, when the Commission Sportive Internationale of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, motor sport’s governing body, issued a pathetic four pages of regulations by which the sport was to be run. They were pretty restrictive. Only the components with which the cars left the factory could be tuned, although competitors were at least allowed to select their own dampers, batteries, brake linings, tires and lights. And bigger fuel tanks, different drive ratios, carburetors and wheels could be fitted.
Never ones to let an opportunity slip through their fingers, the car manufacturers cottoned on to the sport and set up their own rally operations. They soon found ways of sidestepping the CSI’s modest four pages to make their cars go faster. Then they formed their own works teams, with Saab, Volvo, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Citroën, BMC and Peugeot leading the charge to victory and product promotion on the roads of Europe. Meanwhile, privateers represented the Italians, notably with victory in the 1954 Monte Carlo Rally by colorful Grand Prix racer Louis Chiron in a 2500-cc Lancia Aurelia GT, and Gigi Villoresi in the 1958 Acropolis, in Greece, driving a similar car.
In 1950, Saab put together a pioneering factory team of their new 2-cylinder, 2-stroke 764-cc Saab 92, a car that made few concessions to the sport, with its steering column gear change, three speed ‘box and normal production instrumentation. The 92 put out a meagre 28 hp through its front wheels and had an odd flywheel system that meant drivers could change down without using the clutch, so you can just imagine how quickly left foot braking became all the rage. Three weeks after this quirky little car went on sale, the company’s test driver Rolf Mellde won the Swedish Winter Rally with it: Saab had given notice that it was to become a real force in ’50s and ’60s rallying.
The car was followed, logically enough, by the 93, a revamped 92 but with a 3-cylinder inline power unit that generated 33 hp, in which a major new talent named Erik Carlsson won the 1957 1000 Lakes Rally in Finland, the 1959 Swedish and Deutschland rallies. He was on the verge of becoming a superstar.
Don’t laugh, but even the Volkswagen Beetle enjoyed its share of glory in the early days. It won the East African Safari not once but three times. OK, so it was at a time when rally cars were still unsophisticated, to say the least, but Vic Preston Sr/D.P. Marwaha won the very first Safari – held in 1954 to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – Holmann/Burton the 1957 and Fjastad/Schmider the 1962, all in 1200-cc Beetles.
Porsche began a massively successful rally campaign in 1952 with their 356, which later grew into the Carrera. The 356 started out inoffensively enough powered by an 1100-cc Volkswagen Beetle engine, which Porsche breathed on so that it churned out up to 40 hp – 15 hp more than the VW – and by 1953 it was using disc brakes. The German firm breathed even harder on the unit as the years slipped by, so the 356 became the 4-cam, 2000-cc Carrera that produced upwards of 130 hp.
In the nine years from 1952, Porsches won the staggeringly harsh Liège-Rome-Liège rally-cum-road-race four times and five Rallies to the Midnight Sun in Sweden, not to mention taking Helmuth Polensky to the first ever European Rally Championship in 1953 and Hans-Joachim Walter to the 1961 title.
In the late ’50s, Volvo, Sweden’s other car maker, decided to try its luck at rallying with the simple yet sturdy 1410-cc PV 444, even though it had an unsuitable three speed gearbox.
That did not stop Ture Janson and Gunnar Andersson winning the country’s 1957 and 1958 Midnight Sun rallies in it before the car was replaced by the four-speed, 1584-cc PV 544, which was a different story altogether. Andersson, who later became head of Volvo’s rally department, won the 1960 1000 Lakes and Gran Premio of Argentina city-to-city race in it before his protégé Tom Trana reeled off a series of victories in the 544 that really put the company on the map. It started with Trana’s win in the mud, ice, snow and fog of the 1963 RAC Rally of Great Britain, followed a year later by victories in the 1964 Acropolis, the RAC again and the 1965 Swedish. The P544 even won the Safari, aka the Kenya Grand Prix, this time in the hands of a politically correct local driver, Joginder Singh.
The Kenyans knew their country better than visiting Europeans and had hoards of local ‘mafia’ to help them if they got into trouble, so many of the country’s drivers were recruited by the works teams to campaign their cars in this decidedly non-European marathon.
Gunnar Anderson became a double European champion by winning the title in a P544 in 1958 and 1963, with the 1964 going to Trana.
Another of rallying’s pioneers was Mercedes-Benz, in whose Rudolf Uhlenhaut- designed 300SL Gullwing Werner Engel won the 1955 European Rally Championship and Olivier Gendebien the Liège-Rome-Liège. In 1956, Walter Schock became the European champion and Willy Mairesse won the Liège-Rome-Liège, after which Mercedes took one of its occasional breaks from the sport before returning in 1960 with the muscular 220SE under the direction of 1952 Carrera Panamericana winner, Karl Kling. The car was not exactly light and nimble, but it was strong, reliable and powered by a lively fuel-injected 6-cylinder engine. Surprisingly, Schock won the 1960 Monte Carlo and Acropolis rallies in the unlikely looking 220SE before Rauno Aaltonen took the following year’s 1000 Lakes.
Then, Eugen Böhringer stepped into the picture and he drove the 220SE to an Acropolis win in 1962 and then the 300SE victory in the 1963 event. The German star turned in amazing performances in the fast and furious Liège-Sofia-Liège, which he won in 1962 and 1963, the first in the 220SE and the second in a 230SL. The team also had a remarkable run of success in the 2,800-mile Gran Premio of Argentina: Walter Schock and the beautiful blond Baroness Ewy Rosqvist of Sweden won the 5,000 km haul over the Andes and back in the 220SE in 1961 and 1962 respectively, then Böhringer pulled off another two victories in 300SEs in the daunting South American races in 1963 and 1964.
You’d hardly think a big, floppy Citroën DS19 like the one that ferried President Charles De Gaulle around á la “Day of the Jackal” would make an ideal rally car, and it almost didn’t. Its first effort was a disaster. Citroën backed six private entrants driving the cars in the 1956 Monte Carlo Rally, but only the Pierre Courtes/André Court-Payon DS finished, and that was in a lowly seventh place, so the company temporarily abandoned the sport to lick its wounds. Another privateer had to save its bacon, but this time in the simpler ID: Paul Coltelloni and his co-drivers friends Pierre Alexandre and Claude Desrosier won the 1959 Monte in a borrowed car and dragged a wary Citroën back into the rallying.
It turned out to be a highly successful comeback for Citroën, because first the ID and then the DS won some of the most prestigious rallies of the ’60s and ’70s, like the 1959, 1963 and 1966 Monte Carlos, the 1962 Liège-Sofia-Liège, 1000 Lakes, as well as providing Coltelloni with the ’59 European Rally Championship.
The phenomenon of the early ’60s, though, was the pairing of Erik Carlsson with the Saab 96, still powered by a tiny two-stroke 3-cylinder in line 850-cc engine, but now with a 95-hp punch. This giant of a man in every sense of the word – way over six feet tall, incredibly courageous, resolute, a great driving talent and nice with it – took his hot, buzzbox of a car on a rampaged through rallying from 1960, leaving the shattered dreams of many far bigger, wealthier car manufacturers in his wake.
He won Britain’s notoriously slippery RAC Rally three times in succession from 1960-1963, the 1961 Acropolis, 1962 and 1963 Monte Carlos, Italy’s San Remo in 1964. He came close to sainthood by almost winning the ’64 East African Safari in the little car, leading the 3,100-mile event for much of the way only to come second, as he also did on the Liège-Sofia-Liège.
Erik was known as “Carlsson på tacket” or “On-the-Roof Carlsson”, because he rolled his car in rallies when it suited him. That’s how he and co-driver Gunnar Palm got the little white two-stroke out of a pool of mud on the ‘64 East African Safari – they simply rolled it out onto firmer ground. Journalists didn’t believe the tale when news of it reached the Safari press room, so at the end-of-rally prize giving Carlsson and Palm invited everyone to slip outside for a few minutes and watch them roll the car over and over again. When Ford tried to do the same thing, they ended up with a severely damaged Cortina GT!
Peugeot got in on the act in the early ’60s, initially with the plain Jane 404 designed by Pininfarina. The modified 4-cylinder, 1618-cc family sedan could not compete with its more nimble brethren in Europe, so the company turned to the rugged East African Safari in pursuit of some kind of glory. It was a sage decision because the car won its class, coaxed along by local crew Zbigniew ‘Nick’ Nowicki and Paddy Cliff, who brought the 404 home second overall a year later, when Peugeot won the team award. The rains came early in 1963, turning the Kenyan dust into a glutinous ocean of red mud and it continued to pour mercilessly throughout the event. Of the 84 starters a mere seven cars finished – the organizers called them the Unsinkable Seven – as the gooey stuff literally brought the other 77 cars to a halt with clogged wheel arches, among them the entire Ford Cortina team. Nowicki/Cliff won in their Peugeot 404 with only 185 penalty points against second placed Peter Hughes/Billy Young in a Ford Anglia with a weighty 264.
Peugeot almost did it again on the 1965 Safari; Ian Jaffray and John Bathurst took their 404 to second place. After that, the French manufacturer completely dominated the Safari from 1966 – 1968, Bert Shankland/Chris Rothwell winning the first two and Nowicki/Cliff the 1968.
The Austin-Healey 3000 was a crude, muscular, fuel-guzzling beast powered by BMC’s 2.9-liter C series engine that put out 210 hp, an eye-watering amount of power when it was introduced in 1959. It was so much of a handful that Tony Ambrose, Rauno Aaltonen’s co-driver, once described it as the last agricultural implement to win a major rally. It had little cornering savvy, but it went like a rocket on a straight road. BMC tried to win the Monte Carlo Rally with it several times, but it was such a handful through the event’s icy, snowy twists and turns that it never made the top 10, let alone victory. Even the great Timo Makinen could only bully it into 13th place on the 1963 Monte, although he did win the GT class.
If it had one, the brutishly beautiful big Healey’s natural home was on long, fraught events like the Liège-Rome-Liège. It won the 1960 driven by the late, exceptionally talented Pat Moss and Anne Wisdom, as well as the 1964 Liège-Sofia-Liège with Aaltonen and Ambrose. The Morley twins, Don and Erle, almost made the Coupe des Alpes their own in the big Healey in 1961 and 1962. It was only a broken limited slip diff that stopped them winning the rally for the third time in a row, which would have automatically given them their very own gold cup.
Although it had plenty of opportunities, the big Healey never won its home event, the RAC Rally. It did well with the Morleys, who muscled it into third in 1960, Pat Moss and Anne Wisdom deftly took it to second a year later and Makinen with co-driver Paul Easter came second in 1964 and 1965. But the big blaring beast was on its way out and eventually had to make way for the clutch of more technically advanced front-wheel drive cars that were elbowing it to one side in the early ’60s.
Top of that list has to be the BMC Mini, launched in 1959. In no time at all, a batch of these little front-wheel drive, transverse engine 850-cc beasties with a gearbox in the sump were sent to the company’s competitions department at Abingdon. They looked like a bad joke as the tiny tin boxes rubbed door panels in the BMC competitions department with the big, butch Austin-Healey 3000s. At first, lady drivers were fobbed off with Minis – the car’s potential was little understood – until Nancy Mitchell came second in the 1959 Rally of Portugal ladies’ cup in one. But there was a lot of development work to do before the little monster could and did make the rest of the world sit up and take notice.
Things started looking good when Pat Moss won the Ladies’ Cup in the 1962 Monte Carlo Rally driving a 997-cc Mini Cooper with twin SU carburettors. Meanwhile, BMC’s new motor sport boss Stuart Turner put two and two together and got Finns. So he put Rauno Aaltonen in a Mini and the original Flying Finn was running second in the ’62 Monte to eventual winner Erik Carlsson’s Saab 96, until Aaltonen flipped it in the closing stages and the Mini caught fire.
But the Mini’s promise was turning into reality as Pat and Anne Wisdom won the Tulip and Deutschland rallies in it in 1962, and the car’s reliability was confirmed when all three entered for Britain’s RAC made it to the finish, Aaltonen in fifth and first in class, Timo Makinen, another of Turner’s Finns, seventh and Logan Morrison in 13th.
A year later, Rauno won the Coupe des Alpes in a new 1071-cc Mini Cooper S, the version with which Paddy Hopkirk and Henry Liddon beat off a strong challenge from a full American works team of Ford Falcons and famously captured the world’s imagination by winning the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally outright. After that, the already powerful engine was taken to 1275-cc and then there was no stopping the tiny white roofed red Mini Cooper S. The little cars from Abingdon won the Monte three more times – after Timo’s victory in the 1966 Monte all the Minis were disqualified because the Monegasque organizers said they had illegal headlights – twice driven by Makinen and once by Aaltonen, three 1000 Lakes, the RAC, the Acropolis, two Czech rallies and much more besides.
