DAVID EVANS

“Corsica demands respect from WRC crews”

T

ommi Makinen stopped talking and started watching television. It was understandable: he was watching a young Finn driving a Mitsubishi a good few Tour de Corses ago. He was watching himself.

“Is it?” he said, as much to himself as anybody. “Is it… no, it’s not.”

Remembering himself, he smiled and added: “I thought it was the cow. You remember the cow?”

How could we forget the cow Makinen crashed into on the Tour de Corse in 1997?

I love these kind of conversations with the four-time world champion. Slightly random, but 100 per cent fever.

“It was a big cow,” he said. “Same stage as Sunday morning – that was a bad one. A couple of years later we crashed again there, rolling off the road on a right-hander. But the cow was really a nasty one. We came over the col with about 20 kilometres left in the stage and it was there in the middle of the road. We hit it hard and went straight to the wall. We went over the wall and fell a long, long way down.”

Makinen’s arch-rival in 1997 Colin Mcrae had met the cows a minute or two before the Lancer driver, but the Scot’s Subaru had squeezed through the gap between bovine bottom and rock face. Not Tommi. The cow was caught mid-ships by a Mitsubishi badge travelling at 100mph.

Even the cow palled into insignificance when Makinen clipped a low wall on a fast right-hander in 2001. The Lancer flipped, clattered the rock face on the left and slid down the road on its roof to within an inch or two of the edge of oblivion. Makinen clambered out, but co-driver Risto Mannisenmaki had injured his back and couldn’t get out. The drama was huge, the wheel which had been ripped off on initial impact was on fire next to a car nobody really wanted to touch for fear of tipping it down the mountain with Mannisenmaki still inside.

It’s little wonder Toyota’s top man remembers Corsica with little fondness.

This place, probably more than anywhere else in the series, still commands the ultimate respect from the crews. Let’s be honest, whether it’s the Col San Quilic stage, which almost cost Colin Mcrae his life in 2000, or the road just above Corte which did for Henri Toivonen and Sergio Cresto 14 years earlier, there are plenty of reminders about how hard Corsica can bite.

I’m all for the heritage and the challenge this event brings, but I am starting to wonder how much of a future Corsica has going forward in the world championship.

For years the promoter has banged on about getting WRC events on the mainland – the lack of spectators, once again, bears testament to this. And the hours spent travelling halfway down Europe to get there is roughly the same amount of time it would take to get to, say, Japan…

I’m afraid Corsica could come up short.