What makes Monte Carlo so special?

Were the Monte Carlo Rally a member of the royal family, it would be Prince Philip.

Oops. At a stroke, I fear I may have offended the great and the even greater of the Automobile club de Monaco.

I'll start again. Being royalty, the Monte Carlo Rally is just like the Duke of Edinburgh.

Better? Good.

And it is. While the Queen's other half may not be delivering quite the number of show-stopping one-liners he once managed, controversy's never far that far away. Remember his consideration of London's traffic issues?

"The problem with London is the tourists," says the Prince. "They cause congestion. If we could just stop tourism, we could stop congestion."

Fortunately for our economy, more than 26 million tourists come and clog London's city streets every year.

Such words would appear to come from a similar ill-considered vein to the ACM's 2000 communications after the FIA elected to cancel the L'Epine stage following crowd safety concerns.

"The Automobile Club does not approve of this decision," said the ACM's press release soon after the governing body issued its stage-stopping dictate.

"Judging that, contrary to the Observer's assessment, the size and alleged unruly behavior of the crowd, usual at the start, tends as experience has shown to normalise itself once the first car is running."

The Monte has always had a more laissez-faire attitude to crowds © XPB

That's a beauty. Basically, let them stand where they want and once the first car has scared them witless, they'll move of their own accord.

But, just as Prince Philip is appreciated for a failure to conform, the Monte's laissez-faire attitude certainly comes as a refreshing change from time to time.

As the Automobile Club is well aware - and is more than willing to point out - this is the Monte. And there is only one Monte.

First conceived 102 years ago as a push to improve the Principality's dwindling winter tourist trade, drivers were encouraged to make their way through the Alps from six different starting points throughout Europe including Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Geneva, Boulogne and Paris.

Twenty cars started and Henri Rougier won. Or, should we say, was declared the winner. Documented evidence of the rules for the first event are hard to come by.

It's fair to say there was more than a degree of idiosyncratic intervention in the results - witness the driver who made it from Estonia to Monaco on the 1912 event and finished in good time and supposedly inside the top 10, only to be penalised for his car being too dirty. He wasn't in the top 10.

While the first Monte ran more than a century ago, this week will 'only' be the 82nd edition of the event. It has been halted for a variety of reasons ranging from the loss of its sponsor to the Great War. But it survived and developed as a sporting contest into what is now, without a doubt, the World Rally Championship's blue-riband event.

Not that the Monte needs the world championship.

Tired of what it felt was overly oppressive regulation from the FIA, the Monte organisers walked out of the WRC in 2009 and signed up for the freedom of the Eurosport-promoted Intercontinental Rally Challenge.

The IRC offered no regulation over the rally itself and the ACM happily gave a two-fingered salute to the WRC's obsession with the cloverleaf format of central service.

Loeb's 2008 win marked a three-year split between the WRC and Monte © LAT

The Monte's three-year absence from the WRC not only gave the IRC worldwide recognition, but it also offered Eurosport the opportunity to set a new benchmark in the live coverage of rallies.

When the rally returned to the WRC in 2012, it did so under what it considered far more relaxed regulation. Essentially, the rally was allowed to do what it wanted.

Broadly speaking, rallies start on a Friday, after a Thursday shakedown, and finish midday Sunday.

You'll notice the Monte starts on Tuesday afternoon and the competition is completed around midnight on Saturday.

It's hard to define exactly what it is that makes the Monte great. Some of the stages used on the event were also employed on the Sanremo Rally, traditionally an Autumn event that ran just across the border in Italy. Despite offering a similar challenge in terms of roads, the Sanremo withers while its winter rival just down the road goes from strength to strength.

The winter element and the associated challenges are a real strength for the Monte Carlo Rally.

The roads are tricky, but they become a unique test in the world of rallying when they are tackled in January, complete with conditions changing from corner to corner. This is a rally that truly tests the nerve.

Racing up a bone-dry mountain road is well within the capabilities of many rally drivers; it's when you crest the Col and head down a north-facing, ice-laden descent that the world's best show what they're made of.

There's a romance about the Monte. It's an event that comes full of legend and tradition. It's different to the pre-packaged predictability of more recent rounds of the WRC.

You could never call the ACM predictable.

Or maybe you could. After successive victories for BMC's Mini in 1964 and 1965, there were a few who wondered how the impending hat-trick would be met among the Club's stiffened collars.

Mini domination led to the adoption of tenuous new regulations © LAT

After a degree of head-scratching, a rule was found. The rule stated that, in straightforward terms, a car had to be capable of driving with dipped as well as main-beam headlights.

The three works Minis (and Roger Clark's Lotus Cortina) were excluded for the particularly heinous crime of driving with single-filament bulbs.

A Citroen was declared the winner. Predictable? You decide.

Nobody predicted the knee-jerk reaction to a Burzet blizzard in 1973. Numerous cars went off the road and eventually the stage became blocked, leaving 144 cars stranded at the startline.

What was the decision? They were disqualified for not making the next control on time!

That event was Patrick Tambay's first-ever Monte. It wasn't an experience the future Formula 1 race winner was going to forget.

"I must have been one of the last cars to pass the stage," he says. "It was a nightmare with a snowstorm. Cars were stuck everywhere."

Sixty-four cars started the stage, led by leader Bernard Darniche. And Darniche's Lancia Stratos was one of the first to go off. Followed some while later by Tambay's Renault 12 Gordini.

"I had studded tyres," says Tambay, "but I didn't even make the corner. I just went to the field.

"When I got to the end of the stage I looked at my co-driver and we started laughing. It was like a nervous breakdown! There were a lot of cars stuck and there were big fights with the organisers and the police - a lot of controversy."

Confident they had dealt with the matter, the ACM continued running the rally with a significantly smaller field of cars. But the next day, some of the 144 affronted and indignant crews blocked the route close to Digne.

Further chaos and confrontation ensued as the still competing drivers took to the fields to avoid the blockage.

Andruet's 1973 win was overshadowed by the mutinous mood © LAT

That Jean-Claude Andruet won the inaugural round of the World Rally Championship in an Alpine A110 was somewhat overshadowed by the mutinous events of earlier in the week.

In the immediate aftermath there were those who questioned whether the event could survive in the newly formed series.

In the end, the Yom Kippur War and resultant quadrupling cost of fuel stepped in to give the ACM a season to think about what it had done.

When 1975 came around, the Monte opened the world championship again, but there was little appetite for the world famous event.

Two years earlier 278 cars took the start, but that number dropped to 96 in 1975. Many teams boycotted the event and the ACM did little to help itself. It had offered the 144 disqualified crews a free entry for the following year, but when they presented themselves at the next Monte to run in 1975, they were told the free entry was for last year - the rally that never ran.

Entries did recover and were regularly north of 200 again within a couple of years. But the ACM's haughty approach to who could come and start its rally has never changed.

This week, for example, entries are limited to 80 for logistical reasons of getting the whole field through a loop of stages before the leaders return to start it again. But in its communication about the 2013 rally, the organisers talk about: "... the 80 competitors allowed to take part."

As time passes, the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of the ACM become part of the fabric of the event; they're integral. The fact that you never truly know what's going on behind the doors of rally control makes this event that little bit more special.

But if you want to know what makes it truly sensational, there's only one place to be next Saturday and that's the intersection of the D2566 and the D68 - commonly known as the Col de Turini.

The most famous Col of them all sits on the stretch between La Bollene and Moulinet, which means standing at the junction of the 2566 and 68, facing the hotels, and watching the cars dance across the top - hopefully in deep snow - before diving down the Route de Turini and through the famous hairpins to the finish.

The infamous Route de Turini © LAT

The atmosphere up there rivals anything any sport can offer.

Dusk when the cars come through first time around, it'll be turned nine and pitch black for the second run - and it's then that you begin to grasp why people have been sleeping in tents for a couple of days just for that moment.

Fireworks and flashbulbs light the route while a combination of stage-side fires and Pastis keep the cold out. The soul is warmed by the setting and the scene.

And the competition. The Monte is a rally every driver wants to win.

Richard Burns and Colin McRae both approached it with a deep loathing, but both would love to have won it. By his own admission, Paddy Hopkirk's 1964 success changed his life. It's that kind of rally.

And, as such, it's an event worth fighting for on roads that bring out the best and the bravest.

And there were no better or braver than Ari Vatanen in 1985. The Finn had forced his Peugeot to the front of the field and built the T16 a three-minute lead over Walter Rohrl's Audi Quattro.

Then disaster struck.

A timing error from Vatanen's co-driver Terry Harryman dropped them four minutes behind the German.

Vatanen tightened his belts and charged through the Alps like a man possessed. Rohrl, a man who had mastered the Monte on four of the previous five occasions, was powerless to stop the onslaught.

Caught and passed in the Col St Raphael stage, Rohrl sat and watched as Vatanen built himself a five-minute lead. There are those who rate Timo Makinen's 1965 Monte triumph as the drive of the century, after the Finn and his Mini totally outclassed the field on some of the most difficult conditions the rally has ever run under.

But surely, Vatanen's fightback drive 20 years on would have to rate even higher.

And it's a combination of all of the above that keep people coming back through the mountains to the Principality year after year.

What makes it special? It's the Monte. Pure and simple.