Tommi Mäkinen was born in 1964 near Jyväskylä, the home of Finland’s great rally, and grew up on a farm, ploughing fields with tractors and driving whatever else had wheels. He started rallying in the early 1980s and spent years in modest cars before Mitsubishi took him on in 1995.
What followed was the most consistent run the sport had seen. Driving the Lancer Evolution, Mäkinen won the world title in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 — four in a row, a record until Sébastien Loeb broke it. He won twenty-four world championship rallies in all.
Mitsubishi marked the fourth title with a road car: the Lancer Evolution VI Tommi Mäkinen Edition, with a quicker turbo, lower suspension and, on some cars, the red and white livery of his rally car. It is one of the few production cars named after a rally driver, and both it and the Evolution VI it came from are in this catalogue.
He later drove for Subaru, retired in 2003 and turned to building and running cars.
In 2017 he became team principal of Toyota’s return to the world championship. Within two years Toyota had won the manufacturers’ title, and in 2019 Ott Tänak won the drivers’ title in a car Mäkinen’s team had built.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
The cars
Cars in the catalog he drove, won in, or that were named after him.
