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. His father died in an accident when Grönholm was 13, and after spending years in motocross, a bad knee injury forced him to stop riding.
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. By 1996, Grönholm had reached a crossroads, making the bold decision to step away from full-time farming and giving 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. The struggle was beginning to pay off, and his performances caught the eye of Toyota Team Europe boss Ove Andersson, who handed him selected outings in a Corolla WRC in 1997 and 1998. 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 suffered a broken wheel and went off in Ouninpohja into a ditch for four minutes. He got back on the road thanks to the spectators and was lying seventh or eighth in the rally, but decided for the last day that if it felt good he would go to the maximum. At that time Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Mäkinen were fighting for the win, but there were six stages on Sunday and Grönholm won five of them. That made an impact, and after the rally he had five teams calling him, noting that he could have been in a ditch and gone home and been a farmer again.
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 to drive the new 206 WRC. After he and Rautiainen defeated reigning world champion Tommi Mäkinen to score a sensational maiden victory at Rally Sweden, beating Mäkinen by seven seconds, Peugeot was persuaded to expand his programme to the full season.
Sweden was only the beginning. 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, and 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, before going on to claim a second world title in 2002.
