Auto racing is a dangerous sport. That hasn’t been contested since the automobile appeared, and certainly not after the first auto racing fatality. The addiction to speed, the desire to succeed and, potentially, the draw of fame and fortune that follow the celebrated continually draw those who feel like it is their goal in life to turn the wheel, work the throttle, manipulate the gears and to compete with other gladiators on whatever track they are on. Racing is an addiction, let no one person tell you it isn’t, and like many other addictions, there can be a heavy price to pay. Such was the case thirty years ago today for Henri Toivonen and his co-driver, Sergio Cresto.
The scene was the Tour de Corse, a world rally on the island of Corsica. When the rally started on May 1, Toivonen was suffering from the flu and had a sore throat, and was taking medicine, yet if you were to look at his driving, you’d never know…stage after stage, was win after win, and his Lancia Delta S4 was nearly untouchable. Why did Toivonen drive? He had lost his championship lead in the two prior rallies and was hell-bent on getting back into first place. From the first stage onward, Toivonen knew that the Lancia was too much car for the Tour de Corsa, admitting that he was fighting to keep the car under control pretty much everywhere on the all-tarmac rally. Forebodingly, he mentioned after his first stage, “This rally is insane, even though everything is going well at the moment. If there is trouble, I’m as good as dead.”
Nobody will know for sure what caused the accident on the 18th stage, at the seventh kilometer. Whether Toivonen ran out of talent or whether the car proved to be just too much will be forever in speculation, but what happened next changed rally racing: at a left-hander with no guardrail, the Lancia plunged off of the side and down into a ravine, landing on it’s roof. The fuel tank, which was not protected by a skid plate, ruptured and exploded. If either Toivonen or Cresto had survived the initial crash, there was no way they would have survived the fire: the Delta S4 was made of kevlar-reinforced plastics that burned quickly. By the time anyone knew what had happened, all that was left of the race car was the space frame and engine. Within hours, the FISA (the subgroup of the FIA that covered motorsports until 1993) banned Group B and Group S classes of cars, claiming that drivers could not physically react fast enough to keep up with the inputs the cars demanded.
To this day, at that fateful corner, there is a tribute, a marble slab dedicated to Toivonen and Cresto. There is a place on the slab for a bottle of Martini (a reference to his sponsorship) and every day flowers are laid on it by a resident. Toivonen was a driver, and not just a rally driver…he dabbled in World Sportscar and Formula Three, where he impressed driver Eddie Jordan, who would later compare him to Aryton Senna…high praise indeed. Sadly, fate intervened and the world lost his talent, but spare your tears…Henri Toivonen lived a life many dream of but few get to live.
