Michèle Mouton’s landmark WRC title challenge

Earning national and European ladies’ titles in her early racing years, Mouton signed for Audi in 1980. Behind the wheel of her Quattro, she became the first woman to win a WRC event at the 1981 Rallye Sanremo, and went on to finish eighth overall with the boost of a fourth-place finish in Portugal.

A year on, the Rallye de Portugal provided the setting for Audi’s first win of the 1982 season. Mouton and co-driver Fabrizia Pons took the lead from stablemate Hannu Mikkola at the 11^th stage and never surrendered it. The pair finished more than 13 minutes ahead of Per Eklund’s Toyota Celica 2000GT, in a race where more than 75 per cent of starters didn’t finish.

Two more wins would come for Mouton and Pons that year, in Greece and Brazil, with Röhrl the runner-up at each. It was Röhrl’s consistent point-scoring results that meant he held the lead in the Championship, despite Mouton recording more victories.  

Ahead of the penultimate race, the Rallye Côte d'Ivoire, the two were separated by only seven points. But personal tragedy struck for Mouton, who learned of the death of her father, Pierre, just before the start of the rally. A great supporter of his daughter, Mouton’s mother insisted she stayed to compete, fighting for the Championship as her father would have wished. She did just that, building a lead of more than an hour on the humid jungle terrain before issues with the Quattro’s clutch and gearbox halted her hunt for glory.

By the time Mouton was back on the road, she had been passed by Röhrl, who went on to win his second race of the year. Mouton’s rally ended with a crash and her dreams of winning the Drivers’ Championship went with it. Not that that was her concern.

As she would recall: “I never even thought about winning the World Championship. It was an opportunity. It was a difficult time for me and what I remember most of that time is not that I lost the Championship, but that I lost my father at the same time.

“Between the World Rally Championship Title and my father, there is no comparison. For me it has been something I didn’t manage to do, but I have no regrets at all other than the death of my father.”

While personal success wasn’t to be, the Manufactures’ Title was still Audi’s to win. After seven consecutive rallies without a point, Mikkola delivered for the team when he needed to. A win in his native Finland was followed up with a second-place finish in Italy, before leading Mouton to a Quattro 1-2 at the season-ending RAC Rally in York. Audi bested Opel to become the WRC’s first German Champions, by a margin of 12 points.  

On his Championship rival, Röhrl said at the time: "I would have accepted second place in the Championship to Mikkola, but I can't accept being beaten by Michelle [sic]. This is not because I doubt her capabilities as a driver, but because she is a woman."  

In 1983, Röhrl – now racing with Lancia, did have to settle for second to Mikkola for that year’s Title, while Mouton came fifth overall, a season-best result being runner-up in Portugal. She became a part-time driver for Audi in 1984 – which had now added Röhrl to its books, and departed for Peugeot in 1986.

That year, Mouton became the first woman to win a major rally Championship, sweeping the German Rally Championship with six wins from eight races in a 205 T16. Two weeks later, and with the Group B era coming to an end, she announced her retirement from the sport.

Mouton went on to work with the FIA, serving as its WRC safety delegate, as well as being the first president of the FIA’s Women and Motorsport Commission. She was inducted into the Rally Hall of Fame in 2012 and, upon leaving her position as safety delegate, was awarded the inaugural FIA Lifetime Achievement award in 2024.

Her rival, Röhrl, later offered an apology: "Looking back, I have the feeling that it was an unfortunate situation. […] She was like everyone else. I was never thinking during the race 'She's a woman'. It was a normal competitor and I was trying to beat her."

The standout year of her career, Mouton’s 1982 WRC campaign helped cement her as one of the greatest female drivers in motorsport, the win in Portugal in March 1982 being a particular highlight.

“There were all these big guys with me fighting and it was a hard fight and finally we managed to win,” Mouton later reflected. “What I remember most was when we finished, all those women along the road waving at us and everything.

"It was really a special feeling as when you do something, you don’t believe you did it because you are a woman, you do it because you believe you are a driver. But the win in Portugal was something very special.”

 Images courtesy of Getty Images.