Michèle Mouton grew up in Grasse in the south of France and began co-driving for friend Jean Taibi on the 1972 Tour de Corse. A switch to the driver’s seat came from 1974 in an Alpine A110 – a sports car gifted by her father Pierre on condition she proved herself that year or called it quits.
In fact, Mouton ultimately proved so quick that male drivers pressed the FIA to tear the Alpine down and check for irregularities. Needless to say the car was legal. In 1975, Mouton also proved her mettle at Le Mans, winning the 2.0-litre class as part of an all-female crew sharing a Moynet LM75 chassis.
Rallying
But rallying was her focus, and for 1977 she switched to a privately entered 911. She did enough to earn a Fiat France works drive the following season, but it was with Audi that Mouton achieved the most success – a relationship that began in the Quattro’s debut year of competition.
When Mouton lined up at the 1981 WRC season-opening Monte Carlo Rally with co-driver Fabrizia Pons alongside, she knew the PR potential of an all-female crew was a bigger pull for Audi than any likelihood of her winning. She had it all to prove – and did so spectacularly.
Not at first, though. The Quattro was plagued by reliability issues and by the new team’s own operational problems in the early days, mainly because Audi took crew members from its production line, not other rally teams.
Nonetheless, Mouton finished the season eighth overall and won the 1981 Rallye Sanremo outright, the first and only woman ever to win a round of the WRC. It would not be her last.
Stardom
A crash on the season-opening Monte Carlo got Mouton’s 1982 campaign off to a disastrous start, but she won outright in Portugal despite spectators crowding onto the stage and – at times – dense fog, and then followed up that success with wins in Greece and Brazil.
By the time she and Pons lined up at the Côte d’Ivoire – the penultimate rally and a notoriously tough African event covering 750 miles on gravel – it was a straight fight between Mouton and Rothmans Opel driver Walter Röhrl, the championship leader.
Devastatingly, Mouton was preparing to start the rally when news that her father had succumbed to cancer filtered through.
Ultimately Mouton pushed hard in an attempt to recover the time and crashed out, losing the maximum 20 points she looked set to clinch in the process. Röhrl’s win put him beyond Mouton’s reach as her father’s death began to sink in. “I lost the world championship, but I missed my father more.”
Mouton was assured second place in the championship overall, however, and her second-place finish on Rally GB helped Audi clinch the manufacturer’s championship – a first for an all-wheel-drive car. No woman has ever achieved more in the WRC.
Pikes Hill Climb
In 1984 and ’85, Audi of America asked Mouton to represent them at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in Colorado, a daunting 12-mile ‘race to the clouds’ on a dirt-and-gravel surface with huge drops off the side.
Again she found success, taking a class win in her inaugural year despite engine issues and the ballast of co-driver Pons, and going one better on the 12-mile gravel course for ’85 – by now familiar enough with the 156 turns to go it alone.
Despite the penalty, Mouton charged up the Colorado mountainside in 11min 25.39sec, beating established names like Bobby Unser to the 14,110ft summit to the win that year, and bettering the overall course record set by Al Unser by 13 seconds.
Later Years
By then driving a Peugeot 205 T16, Mouton was contesting the 1986 Tour de Corse when disaster again struck Lancia, and the sport as a whole: Henri Toivonen and co-driver Sergio Cresto perished in a fireball that ultimately triggered the end of Group B.
She went on to win the 1986 German Rally Championship that year and tackled various rally raids with Peugeot through to 1989, before retiring and raising a family (her daughter, in fact, was born in 1987). But Toivonen’s death never left her, and in 1988 she helped found the annual Race of Champions, in part to honour his legacy.
More recently, from 2010 until her retirement in 2022, Mouton served as president of the FIA’s Women in Motorsport commission, which encourages female participation in all aspects of the sport. In 2021, her career was chronicled in the Emmy-winning Queen of Speed documentary.
