Speed merchants: How ‘Flying Finns’ conquered Safari Rally, world series

Speeding and drink-driving are serious offences which attract jail terms and hefty fines. The highest fine for drink-driving in Finland is Sh17 million imposed on a top company executive for driving in a 50kph stretch at 82kph last year. In Finland, fines are determined by one’s earnings.

Finland’s rally driving production line is so efficient that it releases world-class drivers in droves annually. They also catch them young. Kalle Rovanpera, the youngest driver to have won the FIA World Rally Championship driver’s title, was 22 years and 1 day old when he did so in 2022. He retained his title the following year 

Another emerging “Flying Finn”, 23-year-old Sami Pajari who is the 2021 Junior WRC champion, has been signed by Toyota Gazoo Racing World Rally Team for the 2025 season after impressing this season. He got his first WRC stage win in Ruuhimaki section of the 2024 WRC Finland in a Toyota Yaris GR Hybrid R1, a milestone in rally terms.

Finland has produced eight world rally champions in the last 51 years, including multiple Safari Rally winners Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Makinen who won the WRC title eight times between themselves. Others who also won in Kenya, and in the WRC are Hannu Mikkola, Ari Vatanen and Rovanpera. Timo Salonen, Marcus Gronholm and Markku Alen complete the champions roster of the “Flying Finns” in the WRC. Finland has also produced three F1 drivers champions in Mika Häkkinen, Kimi Räikkönen and Keke Rosberg. While Belgian Thierry Neuville won the 2024 WRC drivers’ title, Finland had eight out of 35 drivers who scored points in the WRC this year.

The country has one of the highest concentration of rally schools in the world and runs rallying as a business. Many manufacturers have been tapping Finnish managers and using the country as a base for rally development programmes, the most prominent being Toyota Gazoo Racing World Rally Team which selected four-time world champion Makinen to establish the team’s headquarters in Finland in 2017. Toyota is now the most successful world rally team, and has won the WRC drivers’ title between 2020 and 23.

Toyota team principal, Jarri-Matti Latvala, now deputised by Kankkunen, is another Finnish rally star. Makinen remains an advisor in motorsport to Toyota Motor Corporation.

Another Finn, Rauno Aaltonen, has the most number of second-place finishes in the WRC (four times in the Safari Rally besides finishing third once, and in fourth, fifth, and seventh in the Safari Rally. He visited Kenya last year and said strong culture of rallying, self-discipline, and favourable geography are the pillars of Finland’s success in rallying. But there is one traditional self-belief known as ‘Sisu’ which many associate with the Finns in the manner the Spartan spirit of courage is associated with Greeks of the medieval times. 

In Finland, ‘Sisu’ roughly means “strong courage or determination” as former F1 world champion Mika Häkkinen explained is a media interview.

“Climbing a tree and jumping down from there, that doesn’t mean sisu. That is not courage. We can very much relate to ‘Sisu’ in motor racing. For example, when you’re driving a rally car in a forest extremely fast, and you need courage to brake late, to go on the throttle really early, and to go really close to the apex of the corners,” said Häkkinen.

“You learn to drive on roads. We learn to rally in the forests and rally schools,” Aaltonen, who taught rally sport as a subject at his rally school and is regarded as the “rally professor” from Turku in Finland, said. He consulted for major motor corporations as a development expert, and discovered many rallying techniques, the most famous being the “Scandinavian Flick”. 

Aaltonen was the first Finn to compete in the Safari Rally in 1962, and exited the local scene in 1987. He is still active on the road at 86. Aaltonen celebrated his 82nd birthday by competing in ‘2020 Monte Carlo Historique’ in Mini Cooper at the age of 82. 

Last week, Kankkunen told Nation Sport that they identify young drivers as early as the time they can sit in the driver’s seat and see through the windscreen. They also develop them through the forest roads of Finland, ice, snow, mud and twisty roads day and night.

Unlike in other countries, 84 percent of Finnish people reside in urban areas, having vast lands with over 350,000 kilometres of rural roads which are open and free to use unhindered.

Finland also has a well-established talent management structure that identifies and invests in young talent early in their careers. Kankkunen, who now runs a snow rally school, was discovered and nurtured into a championship-winning driver by age 24 by Finland’s best known ‘super manager’ Timo Joukhi. Joukhi also spotted and bankrolled other drivers like Makinen, Latvala, and recently Kalle Rovanpera who joined his stable at 16 after learning how to skid cars in the forest sections at the age of nine.

Kihara wa Wanja, a Kenyan resident in Helsinki who also works in a logistics company took me on an overnight road trip to watch WRC Finland in Jyvaskula in 2022. I visited Oulu, some 600km from Helsinki to get a feel of the Arctic Circle through some of the smoothest but isolated roads in the Scandinavian region.Driving lessons make ordinary drivers extraordinary by world standards in Finland.

In Finland, driving lessons are varied and most, including night driving tests, are either done physically or through a simulator in well-established driving schools.

The most difficult of all tests and training is controlling a car under slippery snow, ice, water and muddy conditions at high speed, Wanja said.