We’re Late For International Women’s Day So To Make Up For It, Let’s Talk About Michèle Mouton

It was International Women’s Day this past Saturday, and let’s be honest here: the car world hasn’t traditionally been great about making women feel welcome. Which is, objectively, ridiculous – cars are something every human can be excited about. I mean, if you stand near an Iso Grifo A3/C and don’t feel something, the issue has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with the fact that you clearly don’t have a functioning metabolism. So in honor of International Women’s Day let’s just talk a bit about one incredible woman from the world of cars, rally driver Michèle Mouton.

If you don’t know about Mouton, I suppose the barest essentials are that she is the most successful World Rally Champion driver who happens to be a woman, and considering she was winning international rallies outright during the peak of Group B madness, that’s saying something. She was also among the first people to rally a turbocharged 300+ horsepower, all-wheel-drive car, the now-legendary Audi Quattro. Driving that car in 1981 gave her her first outright WRC victory, at the Rallye Sanremo.

Just to give an example of how this achievement was received at the time from her almost-exclusively male competitors, the following is the headline and quote from a newspaper article at the time, which ran in the Hamburger Abendblatt, machine-translated from German:

The men were stunned

After the victory of the Frenchwoman Michele Mouton (30) at the Rally San Remo, there was an embarrassed silence among the best rally drivers in the world. The Finn Hannu Nikkola, his compatriot Ari Vatanen and also world champion Walter Röhrl (Regensburg) did not know what to say. For the first time, a woman had won a world championship race. A historic event that left the men’s world stunned. Michele Mouton (she drove an Audi Quattro) and her Italian co-driver Fabricia Pons were celebrated by the spectators in San Remo, and she said: “I think we were the best prepared.”

Men being speechless and stunned is actually one of the better reactions men had to Mouton’s rallying career; when she first started rallying, in 1974, driving a Renault Alpine A110, the shocked and embarrassed male drivers, incredulous at her skill, demanded the FIA tear down and inspect her car for any cheats or irregularities.

(photo: Skoda Motorsport)

The FIA found nothing amiss with the car, only revealing a lot of fragile egos in the teardown process.

Mouton got that car from her father, who was appalled by the bald tires and generally crappy condition of the car she was co-driving in with a friend who introduced her to the sport. Along with the Alpine, Mouton’s farther provided financial support for a team for one year – Mouton had precisely that one year to prove that she had what it took, otherwise she agreed to give up the rallying dream.

She, of course, had what it took.

(Photo: VW AG)

Along with rallying, she also competed in the legendary Pike’s Peak hillclimb. Driving her Audi Quattro, she won that event outright in 1985, despite receiving all sorts of what was essentially harassment from racing officials, penalizing her for spinning her tires and driving too fast, resulting in her right to drive on non-race streets revoked, which meant her car had to be pushed to the start in neutral before the race, since the road leading to the start was technically a public road.

This same sort of scrutiny and punishment was not applied to other drivers, least of which any member of the Unser racing family, which had dominated Pike’s Peak for years.

Here’s a video of the Audi being pushed to the start, and Mouton’s subsequent blast up the mountain:

As you may have guessed, the Unsers in their big V8s weren’t happy to lose to what seemed like peak European weirdness: turbocharging, five cylinders, AWD, and a woman driver. It’s said that Al Unser had some shitty things to say to her, to which Mouton is said to have responded “If you have the balls, you can try to race me back down as well!”

(Photo: VW AG)

The next year, 1986, Bobby Unser won the hillclimb, but, tellingly, did so in an Audi Quattro. That year Mouton had moved to other challenges, driving a Peugeot to win the German Rally Championship.

There’s so much more about Mouton worth talking about, but this is just a Cold Start and it’s already late going up. If you want to know more and just don’t feel like working for the next hour an a half, you can watch this great documentary about Mouton, and if you use headphones, I bet your boss will think you’re working:

Mouton was first and foremost, just an amazing driver. Period. What makes her especially remarkable is not that she is a woman, but that she was an amazing driver who, for no good reason, got more scrutiny, shit, impediments, harassment, and all manner of other unhelpful bullshit from her other drivers and the entire structure of the sport she excelled in, and yet managed to do incredible things, anyway.

Anyway, happy International Women’s Day!