Jean Todt

It is very strange for me, thinking about the past. People who know me know that I much prefer looking to the future. But if I had to choose one event that was the most significant for me, it would be the 1985 Monte Carlo Rally - as team manager for Peugeot Talbot Sport, not when I was a co-driver.

The event was the first in our first full year of World Championship rallying with the 205 and you can imagine how important the Monte is for a French company. Right from the start there was a very close battle between Ari Vatanen and Walter Rohrl, who was running an Audi. Nevertheless, Ari took a lead of about 3mins when the rally approached Gap after the first third of the event.

And then there was disaster. Terry Harryman clocked Ari into the parc ferme too early - by 4mins - and collected 8mins road penalties which the organisers issued at 2mins for each minute early.

I was waiting at the hotel in Gap where the crews were coming for the rest halt and they informed me of what had happened and I just couldn't believe it. For such an important race we had been penalised by 8mins. That seemed to be it. For us, the most important rally of the year was over, we could do nothing about Walter Rohrl who was now leading by 4m4ls and all our earlier work had been for nothing.

In the morning, after three or four hours of hard thinking and calculation. Ari and Terry left the hotel, went to their car and restarted. But we knew that there was not much hope of beating Rohrl on this event as he had won it four times already. But you know, the rally is never over until the very end, so there was very little chance.

When the cars restarted, Ari was almost quicker than Rohrl and when this was known, we realised that something very exciting could be about to happen...

It was now down to a matter of how many kilometres were left and how many seconds Ari could take back at a time. We started with 394kms to go and we were 281secs behind, so the size of the task ahead was clear. It would be very difficult to do anything about it. However, as Ari regularly took time off Rohrl, we saw that by the last few stages, it would be possible to be ahead of Rohrl again.

It was now the last night of the rally and we were faced with a very difficult tyre choice. There was the 37kms St Raphael stage to do and we knew that the conditions were not good. The start was uphill on snow - and then there was a dry section and there was some patchy ice and gravel further on. We had to choose between racing tyres or snow tyres.

The advice of our ice-note crews was to go for the racing tyres and this seemed to be confirmed when we saw Rohrl come out of the services with racing tyres on the Audi. We knew that we were a bit quicker than the Audi and so the thought was to have the same tyres as Rohrl so we would be sure of being quicker.

In this case, however, I always leave it to the driver to make the decision. He is the one driving the car and that way he can only blame himself if he makes the wrong choice. Ari had not been happy about an earlier choice of racers and so he decided not to use them this time, to stay on snow tyres. It was a big gamble.

I was travelling from service point to service point and keeping in touch with the rally by radio. But this time I decided to call the organisers on the telephone as I had a feeling that something important could happen on this stage. This could be the moment where it went well or we finally lost the rally. It could go one way or the other.

So I am waiting on the telephone to hear which car is arriving and at what time. I waited for what seemed like a very long time and then the man said that one 205 was arriving, car number 2. But I told him that this was impossible as Rohrl had started the stage before Ari and it must be him that was arriving first. The man said, "No, no." but I said "Yes, yes, it must be Rohrl that is arriving."

But the man insisted that it was Ari that had arrived and that he had done a fantastic time. I was still on the line and I knew that every second that was passing was very important. The suspense was terrible until Rohrl arrived, about lm30s later. I knew then that we had taken the lead.

Winning Monte Carlo like that was something really fantastic for us. We were a very young team. It was hard to keep concentration on the last few stages but you had to be careful of every little noise and watch for anything that might slow the car again. But nothing went wrong and we were able to enjoy one of the most exciting wins that we ever had.