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1985 — Vatanen’s four-minute warning

Finn storms back from huge checkpoint penalty to win Monte for Peugeot

When you commit just about the most basic error a co-driver can make, you know it’s going to haunt you forever. No surprise then, that when Motor Sport asked Terry Harryman if the 1985 Monte Carlo Rally is an event he is reminded of often, his reply was to the point: “Yep.”

Silence.

Fortunately, the story of Harryman’s gaffe at a time control has a happy ending. He might be weary of talking about it, but not as tired as he might have been: Harryman and his driver Ari Vatanen were slapped with a huge eight-minute penalty, triggering one of the greatest comeback charges in the history of the world rally championship.

The pair had won nine of the previous 10 special stages when they pulled into the overnight parc fermé at Gap. The Peugeot 205 T16 was the first to arrive, by some margin. Had their rivals been delayed on the run into town? No. The awful reality began to sink in.

The running of the day’s final stage had been delayed by four minutes, time that Harryman did not account for at the checkpoint. He thus clocked into parc fermé four minutes early, earning a penalty that looked sure to have ruined a certain victory.

Harryman did not enjoy the break in Gap. “I was distraught,” he says. “That night I began to run a bath, but stopped. I thought to myself, ‘If you get in, you might just drown yourself’.”

But typically Vatanen had not given up. “At first Ari said something like, ‘How could you do this when we had such a great chance to win?'” says Harryman. “Then he just forgot about it and got on with driving.”

There were 394km to the finish and Walter Röhrl’s Audi Sport Quattro had an advantage of exactly 281sec over the Peugeot crew. The chase was on.

“It was the ride of my life,” Harryman reflects. “To take that much time out of Walter Röhrl was incredible. It was all about pure ability and determination.”

Rohrl had always maintained that the 205’s speed advantage would allow Ari to make up the deficit, but few believed him. At first. But now the Finn was closing fast. So fast that the German star was forced into a tyre gamble.

The Col St Raphael stage began with a 7km ascent on snow, followed by 30km of asphalt. The problem the crews faced, as they had throughout the event, was strong sunshine melting the ice and snow: Vatanen chose snow tyres, Röhrl slicks. Audi’s gamble backfired, Vatanen shot past just 2km from the stage start, and had retaken the lead by its finish. Over the last seven stages he opened a 5min gap to become the first Finn to win the Monte Carlo since Rauno Aaltonen in 1967; Harryman was the first Brit to win it since David Stone (co-driver for Ove Andersson) in ’71. You can bet Terry enjoyed his bath that night.

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