WRC
What it’s like to become WRC champion: Grönholm’s journey to the top
From scrambling to find the budget needed to impress factory teams to becoming world champion in his first full FIA World Rally Championship season. That is the remarkable story of Marcus Grönholm.
Next week, a new name will be etched onto the WRC drivers’ championship trophy as Toyota Gazoo Racing trio Elfyn Evans, Sami Pajari and Oliver Solberg prepare to battle for the crown at the title-deciding Rally Italia Sardegna.
Should Solberg overturn his 21-point deficit to Evans, the Swede would match Grönholm by claiming the world title in his first full season at rallying’s top level.
Whatever happens in Italy, however, any of this year’s contenders would be hard pushed to match Grönholm’s extraordinary rise from privateer to world champion in the space of just a few years.
A two-time world champion and winner of 30 WRC rounds, Grönholm is firmly established among the sport’s greats. Yet the Finn’s life could have taken a very different path had it not been for a handful of pivotal moments which ultimately transformed a farmer into a global motorsport star.
The son of a rally driver, Grönholm initially had his sights set on a career on two wheels, as he explains in the latest episode of the WRC Backstories Podcast, hosted by Becs Williams.
“I was interested in rally but I was so young, so I started in motocross,” he recalled. “It was not normal like now where you can go to Latvia at the age of 13 or 14 and go rallying. I had to wait and I was 19 before I could start rallying. It was not allowed before.
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“My father was a rally driver but he died in an accident when I was 13, so I never had a father to help me. He never saw me riding in motocross and he never saw me competing. My mother was driving the van to the motocross races.
“I did quite many years in motocross but then I had a bad accident with my knee and I had to stop. That was not nice as I thought I could be a motocross rider. I did one world championship race in Finland in 1985 and I qualified, which was nice. It was not a good result but I was not in the best physical condition.”
While the motocross accident ended one ambition, it inadvertently opened the door to another.
An insurance payout of 15,000 Finnish marks – around €2,500 – following the crash was invested in a Ford Escort Mk1 rally car. At 19, Grönholm began contesting local rallies in Finland and forged a partnership with co-driver Timo Rautiainen that would eventually carry them to the very top of the WRC.
“It was a hobby and of course I wanted to win all the time, and sometimes too much, and that is like my career all the time,” said Grönholm.
“I wanted to be good and go further but I was never dreaming of world championship titles or something like that. It was always thinking about the next step and the step after.”
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By 1996, Grönholm had reached a crossroads.
The fiercely competitive Finn made the bold decision to step away from full-time farming and gave himself two years to prove himself on the stages and earn a factory WRC contract.
Now armed with a Toyota Celica, Grönholm scraped together the funding required to run his own team and compete in events where he hoped his performances might attract the attention of the manufacturers.
“There were no salaries. We tried to do our best to find sponsors and Timo helped me a lot with the marketing stuff. We did everything to find the budget,” Grönholm added.
“I don't see the same today. The young drivers today are perhaps sitting and waiting for the contract. I was running my own team at the same time. Everyone was working for free.
“I paid the [mechanics] their hotels and food and they were happy to come to the rallies. Imagine this today, it is not possible. They did a fantastic job, it was incredible.”
The struggle was beginning to pay off. Grönholm’s performances had caught the eye of Toyota Team Europe boss Ove Andersson, who handed him selected outings in a Corolla WRC in 1997 and 1998.
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But with Grönholm’s self-imposed deadline to secure a factory contract fast approaching, one final opportunity on home soil at Rally Finland would prove decisive.
Driving a third Toyota alongside Didier Auriol and Carlos Sainz, Grönholm knew he had to make an impression. For a while, however, that opportunity appeared to be slipping away.
“We got the chances [in the Corolla] through him [Ove Andersson] and before Rally Finland I was discussing with other teams [about contracts] but it was an ‘oh, we will see’ type of response,” he explained.
“I had no money or no sponsors to pay anything. At the rally I got a factory car, the Toyota Corolla. I was the third car. It was Didier, Carlos and me, they were great team-mates.
“I was doing okay stage times up until I had a broken wheel, so I went off in Ouninpohja into a ditch for four minutes. I got back on the road thanks to the spectators and I was lying seventh or eighth in the rally, which was terrible because this was a rally where I had to show something.
“Finishing eighth would be nothing, so I decided for the last day that if it feels good I will go to the maximum. It was a win-or-go-home feeling.
“At that time Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Mäkinen were fighting for the win but there were six stages on Sunday and I won five of them. That made an impact. After the rally I had five teams calling me. I could have been in a ditch and gone home and been a farmer again.”
Those five stage wins changed everything.
Suddenly Grönholm was one of the hottest properties in the WRC, with Toyota, Peugeot, Subaru, SEAT and Ford all interested in signing him for 1999.
Ford boss Malcolm Wilson offered him a full campaign in the new Focus WRC, but Grönholm ultimately opted for Peugeot. He drove the new 206 WRC on five rounds during 1999 as the French manufacturer prepared for a full assault the following season.
Even then, Grönholm was initially contracted for only 10 rounds in 2000. But after he and Rautiainen defeated reigning world champion Tommi Mäkinen to score a sensational maiden victory at Rally Sweden, Peugeot was persuaded to expand his programme to the full season.
The result was also a landmark first WRC victory for the 206 WRC.
“It [the win in Sweden] was incredible. Already in the test this car was so nice, my engineer had found some good settings with the differentials and all the things,” recalled Grönholm.
“The rally started and we’re leading nearly the whole rally. On the last stage I was nervous like hell and Tommi Mäkinen was 15sec behind me. I was asking Timo, ‘Is this speed enough?’ about 10 times.
“I was trying to not do any mistakes but I was not sure if I was too slow. But we won by seven seconds.”
Sweden was only the beginning of a remarkable first full season at the WRC’s top level.
Grönholm quickly gelled with the 206 WRC and soon found himself regularly beating the championship’s established stars as a title fight with Subaru’s Richard Burns developed.
Back-to-back victories in New Zealand and Finland transformed a once-distant ambition into a genuine championship challenge. After beating Burns by just 2.7sec to win in Australia, Grönholm arrived at the season finale in Great Britain holding a nine-point advantage.
Burns won on the Welsh gravel, but second place was enough for Grönholm to secure a remarkable maiden world title by five points.
Only a few years earlier he had been running his own privateer operation while working as a farmer. Now he was FIA World Rally Champion.
“I think it was late in the year after Rally Finland [when I started to believe I could win the world title],” added Grönholm.
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“Richard Burns was the main man and we were not sure about the title as there were still many asphalt rallies to come. Of course my team-mates [Gilles Panizzi and François Delecour] helped me a lot to score the big points and take them away from Richard.
“We came to the last rally and I was nervous like hell and we managed to do it. It was crazy.
“We took it quite easy in the rallies and nobody expected us to win and fight for wins. After the first win I got confidence that I could do it.
“I had four or five completely new rallies for myself that year and still we managed to win the title against Mäkinen, Kankkunen, Sainz, Auriol and all the drivers. It was crazy, nobody expected that.”
Grönholm would go on to claim a second world title in 2002 and cement his place among the WRC’s most successful drivers.
Listen to the full WRC Backstories Podcast to hear more about Grönholm’s life after Peugeot at Ford, the driver who got under his skin and the team that almost tempted the Finn into a WRC comeback.
