Henkka: The fascinating life and mysterious death of Henri Toivonen

Some time back in the 1990s, when I was just learning about the history of motorsport for the first time as a child, I was lent a VHS by a family friend that included a programme called Henri Toivonen: His Rally Days. This was the original version of the film, with Steve Rider narrating, lots of 1980s synth-driven background tunes and grainy footage of a car being flung between trees, hedges and walls in the most flamboyant style possible. And I was captivated.

I had no idea who Henri Toivonen was – rallying for me was Colin McRae, Carlos Sainz, Didier Auriol and Juha Kankkunen, the stars of the 1990s scene. This felt like ancient history. As I was watching, I wondered why that might be – given he was clearly a great driver, mesmerising to watch in this not-so-distant past, why wasn’t Toivonen still around? The answer of course came at the end of the video, which abruptly cut to a scene on a Corsican hillside, overlooking the charred remains of what used to be a rally car. To a young boy who had never encountered death in motorsport in a first-hand sense, it was both devastating and fascinating.

Over the years since, I learned that I wasn’t the only one to have discovered him. I discovered that he’s an icon of the sport, beloved in his native Finland and amongst rally fans around the world, and that his death was a pivotal moment in the history of rallying, robbing it of one of its greatest talents and sparking one of its most dramatic changes. Henri’s story was much greater than could be told on one VHS, and he came to represent so much more.

Henri – known to family and friends as “Henkka” – was born in August 1956 in the city of Jyväskylä, the home of the 1000 Lakes Rally, which is known today as Rally Finland. This was no coincidence: Henri’s father Pauli was one of the leading rally drivers of the 1960s, best known winning the 1966 Monte Carlo Rally for Citroën in controversial circumstances after a string of non-French cars ahead were disqualified, and going on to become European Rally Champion in 1968. Henri and his younger brother Harri, a rally and circuit racing driver in his own right, formed the next generation of the Toivonen family’s motorsport dynasty, emerging in one of the most competitive eras in the sport’s history.

Henri entered his first world championship rally on home soil in 1975, just days after turning 19. While he failed to finish, two years later he entered the 1000 Lakes Rally again, and finished a remarkable fifth place. Rally drivers of his youth were relatively unheard of at that time, so for a 21-year-old in a privately-run Chrysler Avenger to finish inside the top five – albeit some 26 minutes down on winner Kyosti Hämäläinen in his dominant Ford Escort – was something quite special.

He immediately started to receive attention from leading works teams, driving two events for Citroën the following year and going on to compete in the RAC Rally for Chrysler. It was this connection that would eventually bring him his first major break. After spending 1979 driving a series of cars across the British and Finnish championships and selected European rounds, in which he had shown promising pace before the inevitable crash, he was snapped up by Talbot – part of the former Chrysler Europe empire, now owned by Peugeot – for the 1980 season.

The small Talbot team was based at the firm’s factory in Ryton-on-Dunsmore near Coventry in England, where models formerly produced as Chryslers were now rebadged as Talbots, including the Sunbeam. Talbot collaborated with Lotus to produce a hot hatch version of the Sunbeam, which the team would enter into rallying in 1980. By now, the World Rally Championship had a drivers’ championship to go alongside the established manufacturers’ championship – first won in 1979 by Sweden’s Björn Waldegård – but the manufacturers’ crown was Talbot’s focus, although they would be up against stiff competition in the form of the dominant Fiats and Fords. To that end, they also signed the more experienced French driver Guy Fréquelin, co-driven by one Jean Todt…

For Henri, 1980 would prove to be a successful year, winning two rallies in Finland including the Arctic Rally in Lapland, and posting fast times throughout, but he also had more accidents and went through three co-drivers. By the time the RAC Rally arrived, little was expected of Henri in a field that also included far more established Scandinavians such as Waldegård, Hannu Mikkola, Timo Salonen, Ari Vatanen, Stig Blomqvist, Timo Mäkinen and Pentti Airikkala, as well as all the leading British drivers of the day including Roger Clark, Russell Brookes, Malcolm Wilson, Jimmy McRae and Tony Pond. It was one of the strongest RAC Rally fields of all-time, packed with experience of the British forests, and most were driving very evenly-matched cars.

What followed was something special. Taking the lead in Grizedale Forest after 39 of the 70 planned stages, Henri and his British co-driver Paul White went on to take a landmark first win for himself and the little Talbot team by over four-and-a-half minutes from Mikkola. In doing so, he became the youngest winner of a WRC event at 24 years and 86 days old, a record that would stand for over 27 years – even today, he remains the second-youngest rally winner behind the current record holder Jari-Matti Latvala, who talked of his admiration for Toivonen when he broke his record at the 2008 Swedish Rally at the age of 22.

Henri continued his form into 1981, where he and Fréquelin combined to help Talbot to their first and only manufacturers’ title – an incredible achievement considering the size and budget of the team compared to their rivals. But the fun wasn’t to last, as the Talbot team was effectively pulled out by the marque’s owners Peugeot in order to focus resources on a new project. Instead, Henri signed for the Opel team. He led on his debut in the Ascona in Portugal, only for the clutch to fail with five stages to go.

He went on to win 1983 Manx International Rally and take a series of podiums on British and world events, but suffered frustration and more crashes elsewhere, including one on the 1982 Circuit of Ireland which left him with a broken wrist. The talent was clearly there, but he was yet to hone it into a more measured approach for finishing rallies on a consistent basis.

Perhaps his attentions were elsewhere. Henri dabbled in circuit racing from time to time, and showed a similar level of promise as in his rally career. In 1982, he tested for the RAM March Formula One team at Silverstone, and showed astonishing pace, lapping nearly a second-and-a-half faster than the team’s regular driver, Brazilian Raul Boesel. Eddie Jordan, for whom Henri drove in a one-off British Formula Three race in 1983, later favourably compared Toivonen’s ability in a single-seater to Ayrton Senna, saying that he would have been a grand prix winner. A year later, he drove in a sportscar race at Mugello for Richard Lloyd. Alas, Henri stuck to rallying, leaving F1 fans wondering what might have been had he converted to circuit racing at the same time Senna was making waves at the top of the sport.

The main focus for Henri was now to be in the right place at the right time in the world of rallying. Audi’s arrival into rallying in 1982 with its four-wheel drive Quattro had changed the game. The old real-wheel drive Ford Escorts and Opel Asconas were making way for the next generation of Group B supercars, but only the Quattro could boast four-wheel drive, with other manufacturers lagging behind. This included Opel, who had debuted their two-wheel drive Group B Manta in 1983 – a good national level car, but outclassed at world level.

Ahead of the 1984 season, his former team mate Jean Todt, now the boss of Peugeot’s rally team, offered him the chance to drive for the team as it continued the development of that new project. This was its own four-wheel drive Group B monster, the 205 T16, which was on track to make its first rally appearance that year. However, Toivonen turned down the offer, instead choosing to sign for Lancia for WRC events, driving the rear-wheel driver 037, and David Richards’ new team, which was running Porsche 911s in the European championship while Porsche continued to develop its own four-wheel drive rally supercar, the 959.

It was another difficult year, typified by perhaps the most famous of Toivonen’s legendary feats. Henri was a man who lived his life to the full, not just in the way he drove his rally cars, but in his antics away from rallying. While leading the Circuit of Ireland, he jumped in a kart, only to crash and brake his ankle. He continued in the rally, only for the gearbox to break. Days later, he headed to Sardinia for the Rally Costa Smeralda, hobbling around on crutches with his foot in plaster. Astonishingly Henri and co-driver Juha Piironen went on to win the rally by just under a minute, ahead of Italian Carlo Capone and his American co-driver Sergio Cresto. After this, he was looking good to win the European championship, following in the footsteps of his father. But in the 1000 Lakes Rally, he injured his back on the event’s famous high-speed jumps, effectively ending his campaign. Moreover, Peugeot’s new 205 T16, the car he turned down, quickly became the dominant car in the WRC, going on to win the French firm the 1985 and 1986 drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles. Alongside this, the Lancia 037 and Porsche 911 soon looked hopelessly outdated.

Henri found himself in a difficult position for 1985, with David Richards and Lancia both demanding his services. But the delays to the Porsche 959 project and the impending arrival of Lancia’s own four-wheel drive supercar, the new Delta S4, persuaded him to stay with the team full-time. However, the car would quickly be heavily delayed, leaving Henri and the other Lancia drivers struggling in the 037 for the 1985 season. His drive to sixth in the Monte Carlo Rally, going toe-to-toe with the vastly superior Quattros and 205s, was as special as some of his great rally wins.

Soon there would be much graver issues, though. On the Rally Costa Smeralda, a year on from his famous triumph, Henri misheard one of Piironen’s pacenotes, and steamed into a tight corner too fast. He spun the car and crashed rear-first into a wall. The impact left him with three cracked vertebrae in his neck, sidelining him for much of the season. A few weeks later, Henri’s team mate Attilio Bettega crashed into the trees at the Tour de Corse, dying instantly. It cast an awful shadow over the team and the sport. Soon after, Ari Vatanen crashed his 205 T16 in Argentina, suffering serious injuries that left him close to death, and questions began to be raised over the safety of the Group B cars and the challenging events in which they were competing.

The S4 finally made its debut until the RAC Rally in November, and Henri had driven very few miles behind the wheel before setting off into the first stage. But with another British co-driver, Neil Wilson, alongside him, Henri put together another of his most famous drives. Despite rolling the new car in the forests, he finished the five-day event with a 56-second lead over team mate Markku Alén. It was his second win on the event, further endearing him to the British fans, where he had become a cult hero. After competing in only four WRC events all year, he finished sixth in the championship – his highest ever placing. This was in spite of the delays to the Delta S4, the neck injury, and an affair with Miss Finland that nearly ended his marriage to his wife Erja.

With Sergio Cresto taking over from Piironen as his main co-driver, Henri returned to the Monte Carlo armed with a much better car than in 1985, and made the most of it. Despite hitting another car on a road section, injuring his hip, he hunted down reigning world champion Timo Salonen to take a commanding win by over four minutes. It had been one of those moments where car and driver were perfectly in sync – Henri took all he needed to out of Delta S4 en route to perhaps his greatest win, 20 years on from his father’s unpopular triumph. After the event, Pauli said “name of Toivonen [has] finally been cleared”.

With a decade of experience and a four-wheel drive car at his disposal, Henri seemed to be blossoming into the world’s fastest rally driver. Team mate Alén, long established as one of the best in the sport, could never get to grips with the S4 in the same way – it seemed to be a car made for Toivonen. In Sweden, Henri again led, only for the engine to fail. After skipping the Safari Rally, the rallying fraternity headed to Portugal, where he was again quick. However, tragedy intervened – local driver Joaquin Santos lost control of his Ford RS200 at high speed and crashed into a crowd of spectators. Three people died, and many more were injured. Drivers were furious at the lack of safety in the organisation of the event, and the sport’s leading names all withdrew.

Instead of heading to the next WRC event, the Safari Rally in Kenya, Henri again took part in the Costa Smeralda in April. He won the event for the second time, beating Andrea Zanussi by 36 seconds. It would prove to be his last win.

The Tour de Corse in May was a notoriously difficult event. Known as the “Rally of a Thousand Corners”, it was a gruelling 1000 km high-speed tarmac test around the hills of the Mediterranean island of Corsica, where the penalty for leaving the road could be severe. Attilio Bettega’s death a year before had highlighted the safety issues, with concerns over driver exhaustion in such fast, physical cars on narrow roads, but FISA – led by FFSA president Jean-Marie Balestre – ignored the issues raised by the drivers, a chorus that included Henri. Making matters more uncomfortable for him was the fact that he was suffering from the flu in the week of the event. Though he played down its impact, fellow competitor Malcolm Wilson, who spotted Henri receiving medication from the Lancia team doctor, later said that he was surprised just how many tablets he was taking.

Even so, it didn’t seem to affect his speed. Driving car number 4 – the same car number as Bettega the year before – Henri took his first fastest stage time on SS3, and then the overall rally lead with another on SS4. He continued to rack up the fastest stage times over the next day and a half, and by the end of SS17, he’d been fastest on 12. His lead was already at a sizeable 2 minutes 45 seconds. Once again, it looked like driver and machine were in perfect harmony – Henri was living up to the billing as the favourite for the drivers’ championship.

But he wasn’t happy. In the service area in the town of Corte, he reiterated the feelings of the top drivers once again: “Today, we have driven more than the whole distance of the 1000 Lakes Rally. After four hours of driving, it’s hard to keep up with the speed. So with a modern car like this, it’s just impossible to race here. It’s physically exhausting and the brains can’t keep up with it anymore.” At the time, it must have felt like just another outburst from a man who was known to be an abrasive character and often chose not to hide his feelings – the short of sharp-shooting that people loved him for. In hindsight, his words seem ominous.

Ahead lay SS18, between Corte and Taverna. Today it’s a quiet road along the cliffside, overlooking deep tree-lined ravines. The road has been widened and resurfaced since 1986 – back then, it was narrow and the tarmac was coarse and potholed, with no wall along the edge. At the time, though, this was a regular stage on the itinerary. Few could have predicted what would happen next.

Henri charged off into the stage, followed by Frenchman Bruno Saby in his Peugeot. A few kilometres in, Saby spotted smoke from one of the ravines beyond a difficult, tightening left-hander. For a moment, he pressed on, following the road as it looped around to the other side of the valley. However, as the car turned around, he could see the smoke was coming from a major fire, with what looked to be a car in flames. Recognising the seriousness of the situation, Saby turned around – something no rally driver should normally do. He drove back to the top of the ravine a few feet above the inferno.

Miki Biasion and Alén in the Lancias both arrived on the scene too. However, there was nothing that could be done. Tiziano Siviero, Biasion’s co-driver, gave the team the agonising call telling them of the desperate situation – he didn’t know if Henri and Sergio were out of the car. They weren’t.

The crash was and still is a complete mystery. When the car was recovered from the ravine, only the badly distorted frame was left – everything else was destroyed in the inferno, leaving few clues. The only video footage that’s ever been made public came from a spectator on the other side of the valley, but the footage that’s been released only shows the car rolling into the trees and exploding. Chillingly, there were very few tyre marks on the road, indicating Henri had not significantly braked before the car left the road.

The obvious suggestion was that Henri made one of his characteristic mistakes. Perhaps it was a similar accident to the one on the Costa Smeralda the previous year, where he misheard a pacenote or carried too much entry speed into the corner. The Group B cars, with their huge engines and little mechanical grip, are said to have created a “tunnel vision” effect for the drivers – had Henri been so deep in concentration that he’d “zoned out” and thought the corner was faster than what it actually was? It seems a logical suggestion, but if that was the case, why were there no indications of heavy braking? You would expect a top driver to realise sooner that they were going to crash and tried to stop it.

The lack of evidence, and Lancia figures remaining coy about the crash in the years since, has led to numerous other theories popping up in the vacuum to explain why the car may have gone off the road without braking. Earlier this year, leading rally journalist David Evans claimed that there is footage locked away somewhere that shows the car leave the road, which Lancia inspected at the time – the video indicates the car made no attempt to slow down or make the corner, further adding to the intrigue.

Firstly, there is the theory that there was some kind of failure on the car, such as a puncture or component failure. Years later, Harri Toivonen revealed that he had been tipped off by a former member of the Lancia team that they believed the crash had been caused by a stuck throttle, an issue the Delta S4s were known to have. In light of Evans’ claims about the secret footage, it may be linked. However, due to the evidence being destroyed in the fire, it remains just a theory.

Adding into the mix is Henri’s illness, and an issue that both he and Sergio had raised about the strong smell of the high-grade leaded petrol that was being used in the car. This petrol included toluene, an octane booster that was commonly using in racing fuel at the time that was later proven to be highly carcinogenic. Did this prove to be a distraction?

A further suggestion came from Wilson, who has revealed that Henri indicated that he was suffering from ongoing blackouts after his Costa Smeralda accident, but that he kept it quiet to avoid losing his job and career. The theory that Henri could have blacked out at the wheel in Corsica is tenuous, but it’s not out of the question – if what Wilson says is correct, and there is indeed footage showing the car plunging off the road with no attempt to prevent it, it would be a plausible possibility.

In the absence of any further evidence coming to light, the deaths of Henri and Sergio will remain an unsolved mystery. However, the impact at the time was clear. For the second time in consecutive rallies, the Lancias withdrew, allowing Saby to take an easy home win in an subdued atmosphere. But most significantly, the writing was on the wall for Group B. Almost immediately, Balestre announced that Group B cars would be banned from all rallying from the end of the season, and for the remaining events they would have their aerodynamic devices significantly restricted in a bid to slow the cars, and fire extinguishers added to reduce the risk of another inferno.

Also on the chopping block was Group S, the nascent formula that was due to take over from Group B in the future – instead, the production-based Group A would take over as the WRC’s main formula from 1987. FISA also acted to immediately shorten WRC rallies, making them less of a draining endurance test. Also in response to the accident came the immediate withdrawal of Audi, the manufacturer that had started the Group B revolution – they are yet to return to the top level of rallying.

The Lancia Delta ECV, the marque’s prototype for the canned Group S regulations

Thus, like Senna’s death in 1994, Toivonen’s death wasn’t only significant in snuffing out the life of one of the world’s best and most popular drivers – it was also the moment that finally killed the Group B supercars. The cars have retained a popular following in the years since, with some fans claiming they should have been retained with better safety features. But the serious crashes over a two-year spell – the death of Bettega, the severe injuries suffered by Vatanen, the awful accident in Portugal, the loss of Toivonen and Cresto, and the fiery high-speed crash of a Ford RS200 in Germany less than a month later that left F1 star Marc Surer seriously injured and killed co-driver Michel Wyder – clearly indicated the cars were too challenging for drivers to handle safely. Even Balestre understood the situation was untenable.

However, there was a positive end to the story. In the years after, the Group A cars became much faster, leading to the emergence of a second golden era of rallying in the 1990s with iconic cars such as the Toyota Celica, the Subaru Impreza, the Ford Escort RS Cosworth and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution. But there was always a desire from within rallying to move back towards the spirit of the Group B rules – what was effectively a bespoke prototype built for rallying, but much more refined to meet modern safety standards.

After several years of developing and disputing the future vision of the WRC, the result were the World Rally Cars, which entered rallying in 1997 and proved to be an instant hint with fans, drivers and manufacturers. The coverage and following of rallying globally would hit stratospheric heights. While the WRC later declined during the late 2000s as the World Rally Cars became prohibitively expensive and manufacturers pulled out, for nine glorious years they took rallying back to the heights of the Group B era and beyond.

Henri Toivonen would have been 40 years old when the World Rally Cars emerged. It’s possible that he would still have been rallying, in his classic flamboyant style that would have continued to endear him to fans around the world. The 1986 title would likely have been his but for his untimely death – Markku Alén, who never gelled with the S4 in the same manner as Henri, narrowly missed out on the title to Juha Kankkunen, who went on to win four world championships, two of which came with Lancia.

The new world of four-wheel drive Group A cars will have suited his driving style well, and he would only have become a more refined driver over time as he added to his experience. He was one of the first modern rally drivers – the likes of Mäkinen, McRae and Auriol all had considerable success over the next decade with their similarly attacking style. There’s no reason to say that Henri couldn’t have joined them to add to the WRC’s glory years of the 1990s. After all, with his rock star lifestyle, devil-may-care attitude and his spell-binding driving, he undoubtedly still would have been incredibly popular and marketable: the sport’s number one superstar.

Sadly, like Gilles Villeneuve in F1 before him, he was lost to motorsport just as the world was beginning to appreciate just how gifted he was. He remains an icon of rallying, and the person who best represents the spirit of the Group B era, as well as the tantalising possibility of what might have been.

All images used in the spirit of fair use