Ari Vatanen: PH Meets

The rally legend on his incredible career on and off the stage, from behind the wheel of an M4 GTS

As excuses go, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better looking one than a BMW M4 GTS, especially when it's wearing the road-grime of a high speed trip to the bottom of France. But that's what you're looking at here, a 500hp rollcage-fitted pretext to spending some time with one of the all-time motorsport icons.

The logic is as follows: Ari Vatanen is now a BMW brand ambassador in France, the country he's lived in for the last two decades. And he's not driven the M4 GTS yet. Sufficient justification to have me begging to borrow BMW GB's hard-working GTS so that Ari can experience the most extreme roadgoing BMW so far. The company went for it, and Ari agreed to spend a day showing me around some of his favourite local roads and talking about his illustrious past.

A proper meet your heroes moment for Mike!

Hook 'em young
I'm going to blame Matchbox cars. As a five-year-old my favourite was a die-cast Mk2 Escort that wore a close facsimile of the Rothmans livery carried by the full-sized version that Vatanen won the 1981 World Rally Championship in (changed just enough to swerve accusations it was encouraging infants to smoke). Vatanen went straight to the top of my personal list of motorsport heroes, and has stayed there ever since. Even among the generation of Scandinavian drivers who dominated that era of rallying his sideways-everywhere driving technique, and frequent forays beyond the edge, marked him out as something special, especially in the supremely agile Group B Peugeot 205 T16 he's probably most associated with. I had a bootleg VHS copy of Climb Dance, the short film made of Vatanen's record-breaking trip to Pikes Peak, which I actually wore out by watching too much.

It was many years before I got to meet Vatanen in person, after his front-line rallying career was over. I'd been dispatched to Senegal in 2004 to cover the end of that year's Paris-Dakar, where he was driving for Nissan alongside Colin McRae. Most attention was on the Scotsman's first run at the classic endurance event - after waiting a day I got a brief interview with McRae accompanied by an anxious PR minder. Later I found Vatanen standing in the lobby of the team hotel by himself, this a man who had previously won the event four times. Deeply starstruck I introduced myself and chatted to him for 10 minutes about the event and his history. He really is one of the nicest guys to ever wear a set of fireproof overalls.

"This is aerospace technology... I love that"

Monsieur Ambassador
The BMW connection is tangential, but Vatanen is keen to stress that there's some genuine competition pedigree behind it. At various times he was a works driver for Ford, Opel, Peugeot, Mitsubishi and Subaru, but he has also driven Beemers in anger. "Few people will remember but I did the Thousand Lakes in a BMW M3 in 1988," he says, "also the Andros Trophy and some other ice racing. I even shared a car with Nigel Mansell at the 24 Hours race in Chamonix once."

He's driven the regular M4 a fair bit on ridealongs and demonstration events, but this is the first time he's encountered the M4 GTS; he seems to be genuinely fascinated by how different it is to the standard car, from the substantial roll cage that occupies the rear of the cabin to the trick water injection system. I show him how to fill the under-boot tank with distilled water and his questions about how it works quickly outstrip my limited knowledge.

"This is aerospace technology," he says, "I love that and the fact they have put it into a car."

Vatanen's love of flying is evinced by the fact he's wearing a jacket from the Airbus Helicopter Pilots' Club - he is co-president - and he admits that he was responsible for introducing many of his contemporaries to the joys of rotary-wing aircraft, including his former co-driver David Richards - the now Prodrive boss being famous for piloting himself almost everywhere.

The bad news is the weather - my visit coinciding with some distinctly British-feeling wind and rain, with the car riding on track-spec Michelin Pilot Cup 2s. Still, if anyone is up to coping with a lack of rear-axle traction it's going to be Ari Vatanen.

Well of course he's still got it...

We start off at a steady, sensible pace, Vatanen getting used to the car and reacclimatizing himself to right-hand drive. He keeps up an unhurried conversation on both the car and what we're driving past - "with the police you have to be careful, although some of them know who I am" - and it takes me a while to realise that the speed is steadily increasing. Firstly in terms of the lateral loadings that Vatanen is putting into the chassis - and the exceptional spatial awareness that sees him using every millimetre of the winding roads without once transgressing the boundaries - but also with more aggressive throttle openings.

It's not long before the stability control is coughing and spluttering as the rear tyres struggle to digest full boost. "It really does feel like a competition car - it's a beast, an absolute beast," he says, "when I think of how hard you had to work in cars with 300hp or even 200hp it's amazing how far things have come." How does it compare to the RS1800 he won his World Championship in? "It's faster, much faster - although it probably wouldn't be quite as good on gravel."

Going native
Vatanen's love of France is obvious, although he says despite two decades in Provence he is still a Finn: "I am a patriot, but never a nationalist", and the affection for his adopted homeland seems to be mutual. When we stop for lunch a woman approaches and they converse for several minutes in rapid-fire French, Vatanen translating a summary as she leaves: "her mother is 88 years old and still drives, but she is much too fast, so they call her 'Granny Ari'".

After his driving career started to wind down Vatanen became an MEP, serving two terms - the first representing Finland, and the second representing France, and he admits that he misses politics more than competitive driving. He tried to segue his political career into motorsport management, running to head the FIA after Max Mosley stood down following the scandal that's well worth reminding yourself of via Google. Vatanen found himself running against Jean Todt, his friend and former boss at Peugeot Sport, with the Corscian very much the establishment figure and clearly Mosley's choice for the role. Vatanen lost after an often acrimonious battle, but his relationship with Todt has since been repaired:

BMW connection reaches back to the 80s

"Luckily it's all patched up now. Jean started a new commission, the Closed Roads Commission, which is responsible for safety in rallying, off-road racing and hillclimbs, and I'm chairman of that, which I enjoy very much."

Is he ever surprised how far both David Richards and Jean Todt have gone since their days as rally co-drivers?

"It is funny when you think that both had their very last rally in the RAC in 1981. David became a world champion with me and Jean became a vice champion, and then in January 1982 they were not competing any more. David started Prodrive and Jean went to [lead] Peugeot Sport... Both were exceptional, you see the people who stand out, who have ideas, who are interested in what happens around them - who see openings and catch them. Society should encourage that; not everyone is Jean or David, but everyone can create something."

Vatanen is also president of the Estonian Motorsports Federation - "they just called me and asked me to do it" - and also works as a motivational speaker and manages his farm in Provence. "Nothing is planned, and that is good. Sometimes life takes a ricochet, you must go with the flow."

Group B
With Vatanen nothing seems to be off-limits, and he often seems to talk in pure quotes. Asking whether he regards Group B as the pinnacle of rallying produces something close to poetry:

"I was just running after my own dreams, but it proves that man needs some crazy things in life. The whole history of mankind proves you don't have any progress without risk taking. If you're afraid that your boat is going to capsize, buy yourself an island."

Group B proves "that man needs some crazy things"

Perhaps unsurprisingly he reckons that the 205 T16 was indeed the greatest car he competed in, with the Mk2 Escort getting an honourable mention:

"It was such a confidence inspiring car, it made you believe you could do almost anything. If you had enough space you could be more than 90 degrees sideways and if you didn't lift off, you kept your foot down, the transmission would pull the front straight. It was an amazing car."

He's more reluctant to nominate a greatest drive, although when pressed reckons the 1985 Monte Carlo gave him the greatest satisfaction, overcoming a huge penalty to take victory. "I had to overcome an eight minute penalty against Walter Rohrl and not fall into my usual mistake of crashing," he says, "and yes, I managed it."

While keen not to get too critical about modern rallying, not least as his son Max has been competing in the British Rally Championship, he acknowledges the sport struggles to make an emotional connection with fans: "We need excitement, not necessarily the latest technology. Just for the sake of argument imagine if we had rear-wheel drive, Jari-Matti Latvala or Kris Meeke in a rear-wheel drive car and the first thing you see is the side number. Competition is not an end in itself, if we don't have spectators, we don't have a sport."

He's even willing to talk about the period after his near fatal crash in the 1986 Rally Argentina when his seat broke, and which led to extreme depression after he became convinced - wrongly - that he had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. Did he ever come close to giving up? It's something he must have been asked dozens of times, but he pauses and thinks hard before answering:

M4 GTS far more fun here than journey home!

"It's not a question of that. You are floating; you are a piece of wood, a little shaving just floating on water. That's what you feel like in that situation, it's not a question of giving up or not giving up, you are totally powerless. You just go where life takes you and everything you see is black. I thought that everything was finished, I'm so lucky I awoke from that dark nightmare."

Au revoir!
A day with Ari isn't nearly long enough. Before I know it we're back at his house and sitting in the kitchen for tea and cakes, his wife Rita insisting on making me some sandwiches for the start of my long trip home. For all its properness as a piece of kit the M4 GTS isn't best suited to a length-of-France solo Autoroute cruise, with its non-adjustable bucket seat and the need to negotiate every toll booth from the wrong side. But this is one journey that I won't be forgetting in a very long time.