Hannu Mikkola was born in Joensuu, in eastern Finland, in 1942, and grew up in the Finnish tradition of learning to drive on gravel and ice long before a licence was legal. He made his name at home, winning his country’s great event, the 1000 Lakes Rally, three times in a row from 1968.
In 1970 he won the London to Mexico World Cup Rally in a Ford Escort — sixteen thousand miles across Europe and South America — and Ford sold a road version, the Escort Mexico, on the strength of it. He went on to win the 1000 Lakes seven times in all.
His place in history comes from Audi. In 1980 the German company arrived with the quattro, a heavy coupé with a turbocharged five-cylinder engine and four-wheel drive, a layout the rally world thought too clumsy to win. Mikkola won the Swedish Rally in it in 1981, the first world championship victory for a four-wheel-drive car. Within a few years every serious rally car had four driven wheels.
In 1983 he became world champion with the quattro, after years of near misses. He won eighteen world championship rallies in all, including the Safari in 1987, and retired in the early 1990s.
Mikkola died in February 2021, at seventy-eight. The Audi quattro in this catalogue is the road car that made his championship car possible.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
The cars
Cars in the catalog he drove, won in, or that were named after him.
