Henri Toivonen’s fame may lie as the man whose death signaled the death of Group B Rally when his Lancia Delta plunged over the side of a cliff at Corsica in 1986, but it wasn’t due to lack of skill: he was one of the youngest drivers to ever win a World Rally Championship and it was at the 1980 RAC Rally in Lombard where Toivonen dialed in his driving style. Prior to the RAC rally, he was well known for a wild style that wound up with the race car out due to a crash, but something clicked at this event. Toivonen himself was caught off-guard by his success…a couple of days prior to the event he told Autosport magazine that he felt like he didn’t stand a chance of being in the running unless someone like Hannu Mikkola crashed out.
Did it have something to do with his car? The Talbot Sunbeam Lotus was a mental little hot hatch, even by today’s standards. While not completely accurate, effectively imagine a Dodge Omni with rear-drive and a screamer of a four-banger under the hood pumping out 250 horsepower, tearing through the forest. Yes, you are seeing a Pentastar badge up front…the Sunbeam was the last Chrysler product created before Peugeot took over Sunbeam’s operations. We got the torque-steering wonder machine that was the Omni GLHS…they got this little screamer of a rally hatch.
The guy being interviewed in this video is Des Odell who was competition manager at the time. In 1982 my wife and I were attending a Sunbeam Tiger event in England and Des Odell took the group to their competition department for a demonstration. They had one of the Rally cars there and the mechanics in real time tore out and replaced the entire front suspension. After the demo,lunch was provided with Des being the featured speaker. One of the revelations from his speech was that he accused Carroll Shelby of intentionally providing substandard Ford V8’s for the Rootes Sunbeam Tiger effort at Le Mans.