Gauld Remembers Bjorn Waldegard (1943-2014)

Not only did I see him at his best in the snow and ice of the Swedish rally but at the end of one of the events in the 1970’s he invited me to his holiday house near Torsby in the part of Sweden called Varmland. When I arrived he had his own private ex-factory Porsche 911 and the idea was that as one of the very special stages held on a frozen river was nearby we would have a blast on the frozen river that had been snow plowed.

I have traveled at speed on snow and ice with many Swedish rally drivers and they all have different styles but Waldegard was so smooth in that Porsche it was hard to believe the speeds he was going at on the fastest stretches between the river bridges. He was hitting over 120 mph using pretty heavy studs but when it came to braking for the twisty bits he sat back and relaxed.

This is what you call car control: Waldegard on the frozen pony trotting track at Karlstad in his Poprsche in 1972.

He was quiet spoken and no matter what he drove he drove it flat our and he is well up the list in the Swedish rally drivers hall of fame. In 1979 he won the very first World Rally Drivers Championship. He was a factory driver for Toyota with the Celica, Lancia with the Stratos, and Porsche with the 911. He handled those three totally different cars with ease and style. Sadly, the cancer which struck him a few years ago took its toll and he died last week on August 29th. However, when rally drivers meet, the shy and retiring Bjorn Waldegard will always be remembered.

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Below, we re-publish Graham’s well told tales of the Winter Rallies in which he-and Henry Manney-would follow frostbitten. These were Born Waldegard’s time and turf where he often drove a Volkswagen..

Ice, Snow, Renault R8s, Alpines, Lancia Fulvias and Gauld

Eugen Bohringer in the Porsche 904. One of Gauld's favorites, taken at the top of the Col de Turini, during the Monte Carlo Rally when there was snow, as it should be!

The legendary Monte Carlo Rally finished last Saturday, but lost a lot of its fascination because there was precious little snow. Winter rallies should have snow, which differentiates them from other rally championship events.

All this got me thinking of my favorite snow rally, the International Swedish event that takes place in February and, being located over 2000 kms north of Monte Carlo, can usually provide plenty of the white stuff. I covered the Swedish Rally four times, the first time in 1966 by persuading Henry Manney III that we had had enough covering the Monte three years running. Why don’t we do something different I asked, and from the moment we landed in Gothenburg and set out on our 120 mile north into Varmland and the town of Orebro it truly was different!

That year Volvo had invited a fascinating and amusing character, Sardar Joginder Singh Bhachu , or Joginder Singh as he preferred to be called, a Kenyan-Indian who, had become the first Sikh to win an International rally.

Joginder Singh in his turban/helmet waits to start a special stage whilst a local Swede looks surprised.

He arrived at Orebro complete with a turban over his crash helmet and bubbling with enthusiasm. Joginder and his brother Jaswant had won the 1965 East African Safari Rally with a rebuilt Volvo. As Joginder explained to us , “ My brother and I wanted to do the Safari and we heard that the Volvo distributor in Nairobi had the wreckage of a factory car Tom Trana had crashed the previous year. So we went to the dealership and bought the wreck very cheaply. My brother and I totally rebuilt it and went out and won the Safari.”

On the strength of that victory, Volvo gave him a factory drive on the Swedish, but he had never even seen snow in his life before being let loose on a frozen Swedish lake a few days before the event. He likened the experience to driving at high speed in the mud in Kenya.

Joginder shows his stuff in the snow, which he had never even seen before!

On the rally he proved to be much quicker than everyone expected and certainly deserved his factory drive. Joginder went on to become the first driver to win the Safari three times; mind you at that period in rally history, it was the Swedes who were winning everything, led by drivers like Erik Carlsson, Bjorn Waldegard and Per Eklund.

The main memory of the event was the extreme cold. At 3 am one morning out on a desolate stage with the wind sweeping in from Russia, we recorded minus 41 degrees but luckily it was dry. Because of the extreme weather the Swedes not only used forests for their special stages, they also used frozen rivers. They would bulldoze a multi-kilometer stage right down a frozen river and when they reached a bridge, they would snowplow a twisted serpent course so that the spectators had some fun watching the drivers in action. As can be seen from some of the photos this was one of my favorite stages. To keep warm the spectators would build huge bonfires on top of the ice secure in the knowledge that it would not melt.

Manney and Gauld dressed for their coverage of the Swedish Rally.

The rally moved to Karlstad the following year and this brought another unique event. A series of four car races, were run on the local snow-covered pony-trotting track. This was where the top drivers could show off their skill to the spectators and it was quite spectacular. One year Bjorn Waldegard eschewed his normal Porsche for a Volkswagen Beetle, of all things. For those of us who knew the handling of a Beetle, Waldegard’s full-lock controlled slides were amazing.

Bjorn Waldegard demonstrating how to handle a Volkswagen Beetle in snow and ice.

Russian enthusiasts, who longed to compete, would slip across the border and enter their Moskvitches and Volgas. Compared to the Swedes with their lightweight snow shovels, the Russians arrived with heavy iron spades to dig themselves out of the snow. But their cars were never competitive; however they certainly provided some foreign glamour in those Cold War days.

Sandro Munari and John Davenport in their Lancia Fulvia on the frozen river stage in 1967.

My last trip to the Swedish Rally was in 1973. The entry list had become more impressive with factory teams from Renault, Fiat, Lancia, Moskvitch ( Russian built Fiat 125 derivatives), and of course SAAB and Volvo. All the top drivers of the day participated but still the event was won by Swedes. It was not until 1981 that Hannu Mikkola from Finland won the event in an Audi and broke the Swedish stranglehold. Today it is the French who are winning – the Monte last Saturday being won by Sebastien Ogier with his Volkswagen.

Jean-Pierre Nicholas in his Renault Alpine 110 sliding on the icy pony track at Karlstad.

There were two more fascinating experiences that I can tell the grandchildren. The first was shortly after the Swedish Rally, when Bjorn Waldegaard suggested I drive up to his farm. There, he rolled out his ex-factory Porsche 911, and we drove it on to the special stage plowed on the river that had been used two days before. The ice was not heavily rutted, but Waldegaard demonstrated ice driving as it should be done. At one point between two bridges we were pulling over 120 mph in a cloud of ice chips thrown up by the studs on the tyres. Yet he was able to smother this speed with a series of left and right slides in order to get round the tight corners. THAT was an eye opening experience.

Jean-Francois Piot hurls his little Renault Gordini over the river special stage (1967) near Torsby, Sweden.

The other was at a frozen lake when SAAB and Erik Carlsson were trying to teach some of us journalists the technique of fast ice driving. Where we had congregated, there were two intrepid Swedes with single-seater Formula Vee race cars equipped with long racing spikes. One of them offered me a drive, and full of confidence with my SAAB training, I jumped into the cockpit. The temperature that morning was minus 26 degrees so I wrapped up with scarves round my face to avoid frostbite, and off I went. Driving a Formula Vee with long spikes on ice is a very bumpy journey and the car was literally bouncing from side to side at 100 mph but the grip was phenomenal. What I did not realise was I had left a strip of unprotected flesh round my throat and I had mild frostbite. This in turn meant I literally couldn’t speak at lunchtime, much to the pleasure of all!

Gauld in action with the Formula Vee and long spikes. Great traction but a lumpy drive.