One of the few January norms that isn’t utterly miserable is the Monte Carlo Rally. First held way back in 1911, it has served as an exciting, snowy-mountainside opener to almost every year since for rallyists.
Today, it’s a standard World Rally Championship round, but historically it was an absolute epic, with crews departing from various locations all over Europe to meet in the French Alps and sprint down to the waterfront in Monaco.
So romantic was the format for the first-ever WRC event in 1973 – but this was far from an auspicious inauguration. Just a glance at the final classification suggests why: 44 cars finished, 234 didn’t. Yikes!
This wasn’t the result of some horrendous pile-up, thankfully. Instead, they were disqualified en masse by the organisers. This was a highly controversial decision, of course, made worse by the fact that almost all of those affected were privateers who had paid a large sum for an experience.
The privateers had already been irked before the rally even started when the organisers had belatedly announced that studded tyres would be banned on the Col du Corobin mountain climb, due to concerns over them unduly wearing the road surface, thus requiring all to carry an extra set of rubber – a decision on which they relented after the backlash.
Then, on the third day, as has so often been the case on ‘The Monte’, snow and ice created chaos.
Privateer Ferdi Bökmann broke an arm crashing his Alpine A110 on the Concentration Run, and the stage had to be held up for an hour while an ambulance arrived. Later that afternoon there was a further delay in starting the Burzet Loop stage when a non-competing car had an accident.
Overall leader Bernard Darniche promptly buried his works A110 in a snow bank, then Björn Waldegård followed suit in one of Fiat’s 124 Abarths, all while the conditions deteriorated, harsh winds working to rebuild the snow drifts earlier cleared by ploughs.
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Some 20 cars got stuck on the stage, either having crashed or got stuck behind those that had. Ambulances and tow trucks had to be allowed in, leading to yet more time delays. And come 11.30pm the road was closed, blocked by snow.
