Yahoo Finance What I'd Do Differently: Walter Röhrl
From the August 2017 issue
C/D: What did you do before your first factory drive at age 24?
WR: I was working for the Catholic Church, in the administration of farm land. It meant lots of sitting in a car; in one year I did [74,565 miles]. I drove a big Mercedes, a diesel. It was slow but taught me to look far ahead and not to brake so I could carry speed. It was a good school for me.
C/D: You drove Audis during rallying’s notorious Group B period. Did you see that as the pinnacle?
WR: For the emotion, yes, and for the power. Normally people say that if you have a lot of horsepower it makes it easy to win, but it’s not like this with rallying. It’s much easier to have less horsepower if everyone has the same. But, for me, it was perfect, those 500-hp cars, and with four-wheel drive it was not a question of traction. Get the car in the direction you want and then go flat out. There was more skill to rear-wheel drive, where my favorite car was the Lancia 037. With 325 horsepower and weighing [2116 pounds], it was precise like a Formula racing car. That was the one I liked the most.
C/D: Group B was canceled at the end of 1986 after Henri Toivonen’s fatal crash. Did you agree that speeds had become too fast?
WR: For me it was bad when Group B got canceled. The big advantage is that I didn’t need to listen to my co-pilot so much, I had 90 percent [of the course] in my head—the film was running and I knew what to expect, even without pace notes. But the spectators were something I cannot understand, even today. I see the films and I am shocked by what I have done, how close people were. After every event I said, “One day, I will kill five people.” Sure, they could jump away, but if something happened to the car and I crashed, it would be a disaster.
Röhrl returned to Pikes Peak with the Quattro S1 in 2012, 25 years after his 1987 victory.
C/D: You moved into developing road cars, most famously for Porsche and on the Nürburgring. How many laps have you driven there, and why do you feel such an affinity for the place?
WR: I don’t know how many, but thousands. I like it because it’s not like most circuits; if you make a mistake, then bang, you are in the fence or in the forest. If all the racetracks were like the Nürburgring I would have been a [road-racing] driver, and if you want to make a perfect car you have to test it there, that’s why it works so well for Porsche. I never get bored there; every lap is a new challenge.
C/D: Any thoughts of retirement?
WR: I am thinking about it. I am 70 and still crazy, but the time is coming. I have made the first step, I stopped development driving on the Nürburgring. I’m still in one piece after 45 years of motorsport; maybe it’s time to be a bit quiet.
C/D: What would you do differently?
WR: I was too long with Opel, that was a mistake. I had won my first title, European Champion, and I thought “I cannot leave now.” But the car was useless and I wasted two years. The rest was okay. People ask, “You had the chance to be champion five or six times, why didn’t you do more rallies?” And I say I didn’t want to be world champion even once, I just wanted to win Monte Carlo. That was the aim of my life, the rest was nothing to me.