GOODWOOD RALLY HERO HONOURED
Since the last Festival of Speed the motorsport world has said goodbye to one of the rallying’s greats and the designer of Goodwood’s very own rally stage Hannu Mikkola, who died of cancer in February aged 78.
To honour the 1983 World Rally champion, a selection of cars that Mikkola piloted during his career, which included 18 WRC wins spanning a 20-year period in rallying’s top tier, gathered to take on the forest stage he helped create in 2006.
It was perhaps fitting that examples of the Ford Escort RS1800 Mk2 he mastered and five iterations of the brutal Group B Audi Quattro, a car he helped develop during the 1980s, were on show to pay tribute to one of rallying’s greatest.
Those special cars joined a fleet of rally vehicles from the late-1960s to the present-day Ford Fiesta R2 car.
Away from the rally stage, Goodwood was the venue of choice to usher in the World Rally Championship’s new hybrid era as M-sport Ford took the covers off its new Ford Puma 2022 weapon. The British team is the first to officially launch its new WRC challenger built to the championship’s new Rally1 hybrid rules, which will see all top-flight cars fitted with a 100kw hybrid system that will be used at certain points during stages and road sections next year.
Ford has worked closely with M-sport to create the Puma and, such is the excitement that the new rules have created, Ford sent its CEO Jim Farley and Ford Performance’s global boss Mark Rushbrook to Goodwood to oversee its launch – and witness WRC rising star Adrien Fourmaux and Matthew Wilson put the Puma through its paces on the hillclimb.
Adding to the cast of rally cars on show was rallying royalty in the form of nine-time WRC champion Sebastian Loeb, who wowed fans on the hillclimb in his Prodrive-built 2021 Dakar Rally BRX Hunter.