Death
The 1986 Tour de Corse, a world rally around the island of Corsica, began on Thursday, 1 May. Toivonen had a sore throat and was suffering from flu, but he insisted on driving after having lost his championship lead in the last two rallies. According to several sources, he was also taking medicine to treat fever. Despite his ill health, he was taking stage win after stage win and leading the rally by a large margin. After the first leg, Toivonen commented:
"This rally is insane, even though everything is going well at the moment. If there is trouble, I'm as good as dead."
Toivonen was complaining about the car being too powerful for a rally like the Tour de Corse. He found it very hard to keep the car balanced on the road and admitted it was very exhausting. In a short interview before he steered his Lancia into the 18th stage, Toivonen made a comment which would remain his last words in public:
"Today, we have driven the equivalent of a full Jyskälä. It's hard to keep up with the speed."
During the second leg, on Friday, 2 May, at the seventh kilometre of the 18th stage, Corte–Taverna, Toivonen's Lancia went off the side of the road at a tight left corner with no guardrail. The car plunged down a ravine and landed on its roof. The aluminium fuel tank underneath the driver's seat was ruptured by the trees and exploded. The fuel tank was not protected by a skid plate, an item used mainly on gravel rallies, which was not fitted for the all-asphalt Tour de Corse. The explosion happened within seconds of the crash, and Toivonen and his co-driver, Sergio Cresto would not have time to get out had they still been alive. The fire caused by the explosion was so intense that the Delta S4, built of fast-burning kevlar-reinforced plastic composite, was unidentifiable as a car afterwards. Both Toivonen and Cresto died in their seats. Toivonen left behind wife Erja and two young children, son Markus and daughter Arla, while Cresto was single with no children.
Toivonen's accident remains a mystery because it had no close witnesses. Although it was caught on tape by a spectator further down the stage, it proved to be impossible to determine the cause of the crash from the footage. No race marshalls were close to the scene to notice the black smoke and no-one at the race finish knew about the accident. Toivonen's team only started to fear something might have happened after he failed to arrive from the stage on schedule. The next rally crew through the stage then mentioned they had seen some black smoke. By the time the emergency vehicles arrived on the accident scene, they could only put down the flames, which had been fanned by breezes. Lancia engineers and technicians could not determine the cause of the accident because the remains of the car were so charred. Walter Röhrl later confirmed that Toivonen was taking medicine for his flu, but the cause of the accident is still unknown.
Read more about this topic: Henri Toivonen
Famous quotes containing the word death:
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