1999: Makinen's fourth WRC title

The Finn was less than halfway through the penultimate round of this year's series, but that was the point when the Mitsubishi team leader moved into the title-winning position he would keep to the end.

He went to Australia with a six-point advantage over Toyota's Didier Auriol. His dilemma was whether he should go flat out for the win that would put the series beyond doubt or take things more cautiously and play the points game. Providing he extended his lead over Auriol by four points over the Australian and British rounds, the title was his.

Typically, he favoured the bold approach. "It's an interesting question, what to do, but I think the only way is to drive flat out. I like this rally and it's a better place to have a party. I want to go to Britain and try to win the rally for the first time and it will be easier if I haven't got to worry about the title."

Auriol was in no mood to let him have an easy run, however, and stamped an uncharacteristic authority on the early stages. Normally, the Frenchman plays himself in gradually, but he banged in a run of three fastest times on the fairly short opening group of tests close to York. "It's going very well," he admitted. "I'm feeling confident, but I'm having to take risks all the same. They're not big risks, though. I call it my 'nicely limit'."

At this stage of the game, he was leading and his title rival was fifth, but things were about to go wrong. At the pre-event shakedown, Auriol had felt that the Toyota wasn't handling right. Front differential failure was diagnosed and he was worried that this might recur. It did, and the Toyota promptly tanked into a tree.
The Corolla emerged with a deep V in the bonnet, just to the inside of the right-hand headlight. The alternator pulley was jammed and by the end of the stage Auriol's rally was virtually run. "There was no water and the oil temperature was so, so high," the driver explained.

The engine refused to fire at the regroup control so the crew pushed it instead and waited while the engineers tried their best to rectify the problem. It took brute force to separate the front of the car from the engine, but once it turned over and sprayed water out of the plug sockets, the rally was over. His title hopes now lay in Makinen's hands, but few expected a dramatic ending.

All of this handed the lead back to Colin McRae, who had been fastest on the previous night's head-to-head opener at Langley Park. His advantage, gained with fastest time on the seventh test, was quickly handed over to Makinen for a stage before Carlos Sainz grabbed a lead he would hold to the end of the day.

The Spaniard was on a high. His deal to drive for Ford next season had been confirmed the previous evening, so he was under no pressure. He did have a target, however, as third place would confirm Toyota as manufacturers' champion in its final year.

Peugeot had already hit reliability problems. Marcus Gronholm had discovered the Western Australia roads are treacherous and said the 206WRC was "handling like a snake" after he went off.
His team mate, Francois Delecour, was in deeper trouble when the gearbox shed a few cogs. "I've still got first, fourth and fifth," he said. "That's not exactly ideal!" The team switched the unit while Auriol's drama was unfolding, but the new gearbox was soon in trouble and by the end of the night Peugeot had withdrawn the car.

That stage had also determined the outcome of the Group N championship. Hamed Al Wahaibi's Zubair team had drafted former title contender Uwe Nittel in to try to keep Gustavo Trelles down the order and hopefully take the battle to the final round. However, Al Wahaibi's Mitsubishi kicked out of a rut and sideswiped a tree, the impact all but tearing off the left rear wheel. He reached service, but was going no further. Trelles was now too far away to catch, which was fortunate as he ditched his own car a couple of stages later.

Group N fell into the hands of rising Japanese star Toshihiro Arai, with Nittel second and Aussie favourite Cody Crocker third.

As far as Formula 2 was concerned, Kenneth Eriksson had enjoyed a pretty trouble-free run in the Hyundai to lead at this stage, although the loss of an alternator belt had caused a scare for a while. His team mate, Alister McRae, lost a brake line to one of the rocks and dropped to fourth. He regained third from Mark Higgins in short order and retained the position, despite having more brake dramas.

Hyundai's title rival, Renault, was enjoying mixed fortunes. Martin Rowe was splitting the Hyundai duo at the close of play, but Tapio Laukkanen was in seventh after dumping the Megane in a ditch for 10 minutes.

The organisers had introduced a scheme where leading drivers could choose their start slots for the following day's action and, accordingly, overnight leader Sainz picked number 10. The rest followed in a predictable pattern, with Gronholm getting Hobson's choice of opening the batting on Saturday's stages south of Perth.

Richard Burns was snapping at the leader's heels with Ford's McRae a relatively distant third. Makinen was still not in the title-winning slot, but was comfortable and under no pressure. Fourth would put him nine points clear of Auriol. A top six in Britain would do the trick.

Burns' second place was a boost for Subaru. The team had seen Australian champion Possum Bourne retire with cam belt failure on the second stage and suffered a body blow when Juha Kankkunen ripped a wheel off just 500 metres into the fifth stage. "It was a really silly accident, just one of those things, but there was too far to go to reach the finish," said the Finn.

The carnage looked set to continue on Saturday morning when the third-placed Focus crashed out of the event at warp speed. "It was a really fast section and we were flat in sixth for about 30 seconds before we hit a jump I didn't recall from last year," said McRae. "We landed heavily and the steering wheel spun out of my hands. [Co-driver] Nicky [Grist] and I were just passengers from that moment as the car slammed into a tree. That was the biggest and most frightening accident I've ever had."

The team reckons the car went from l60kph to zero in 10 metres and rival crews were amazed that the pair escaped unharmed apart from a knock on the head and a sore ankle respectively. Afterwards, the Scot joked, "They gave me a brain scan and I was quite surprised to find that I've actually got one!"

Burns leapt into the lead with a string of fastest times, broken only when he overshot a junction and allowed Sainz to steal a few seconds back. "Carlos was a bit quicker on the last couple of stages, but I think the roads were cleaner and maybe his car was working a bit better," said the Englishman, who had led throughout the day. "I'm not actually driving flat out so I've probably got a bit in reserve," he admitted. "More importantly, I get to choose my start position first."

At the end-of-leg press conference to select start positions for the final day, Sainz insisted he had been taking things easy as well. His rivals collapsed in hysterics...

SEAT's day was a nightmare. Both cars hit problems that were resolved only by a turbo change, but the worst came for Gardemeister. The team hoped a gearbox change would solve transmission problems, but it was in vain. On the longest stage, Gardemeister's car dropped into two-wheel drive and the youngster slithered down to 20th.

"The biggest problem was that I was aiming to hold up other cars," he said. "I stopped for about five minutes in total letting people past and that added to the time I lost."

Makinen continued to hold a title-winning third, taking things fairly carefully. "I'm in no hurry," he said. "There's no special pressure and it's actually quite fun." However, the tail of the Mitsubishi was showing evidence of contact with the scenery. Its driver knew he musn't overstep the limit by a fraction.

Team mate Freddy Loix was covering the Finn's rear, but was frustrated by a front diff problem. "I felt it locking during the first few stages, but the team couldn't find anything in the data. It was really bad on the long stage and then the team finally saw what I meant. By then it was too late. I'm actually rather disappointed."

The lone Ford left in the event, driven by Thomas Radstrom, nearly joined the retirements at the end of the day. The Swede caught something and damaged his suspension sufficiently to be worried about losing a wheel on the final blast over Langley Park. Happily, it all held together.

Nittel moved into the Group N lead during the day, but Eriksson retained the F2 advantage. Rowe was 40 seconds adrift, but clear of the Higgins/McRae battle for third. Heading into the last day, the Volkswagen driver was ahead by almost two minutes, McRae having broken a driveshaft on Saturday's first stage and losing loads of time running through the second test like that.

Nevertheless, Higgins' Golf was no longer a title contender (the team hasn't tackled the requisite number of events to qualify), so Hyundai needed only to take first and third in Australia and Britain to take the F2 title.

Battle resumed in the Bunnings complex and, initially, it seemed that Sainz was going to make a fight of it. He chopped four seconds off Burns' lead on the opening stage and was now just one second behind. The Oxfordshire driver admitted he had not driven as fast as he should over the first third of the stage, but he lit the fire for the second stage and beat the Spaniard by over 10 seconds, even with an 'off', to reconfirm his authority.

No one was really prepared to
take risks at this point of the rally. Makinen was not bothered about winning the battle if he could be assured of victory in the war and Sainz was determined to wrap up
Toyota's makes' title. Even so, the leading pair crossed the finish line of the penultimate stage 14 seconds faster than the rest. That equates to around half a second a kilometre.

Behind these two, the best of the rest on the stages was Rovanpera in the SEAT, really flying now and clawing his way back up the order from seventh to fifth in the first two stages. Unfortunately, team-mate Gardemeister was first slowed by a kangaroo on the penultimate stage and also again suffered the loss of drive to the front wheels.

While Eriksson sailed serenely on to claim the F2 prize, Nittel's Group N lead evaporated on the day's opening stage. The German hit a rock and damaged the suspension, dropping back to second behind Arai's Subaru.

The title battle all came down to the final stage, 2.73km over the famous Bunnings stages where the cars perform an aerial ballet over the double jumps before plunging through the ford that has spelt disaster for many in the past. Surely nothing could go wrong now, but everyone was thinking about the end of last year's Rally GB, when Sainz lost the title half a mile from the finish of the final stage.

The top crews probably drove the final stage slower than ever before, but this was no time for heroics. Sainz was quickest by a tenth of a second from Burns, but the Englishman had done enough to secure his second victory of the season. Makinen, meanwhile, was seventh, after barely getting airborne over the jumps. He made up for it on the podium, though. Four titles in a row is an incredible record, and who's to say he won't make it five?