Michèle Mouton was born in Grasse, in the south of France, in 1951, and began rallying as a co-driver for a friend before taking the wheel herself. By the late 1970s she was winning in France with Fiat and Alpine, and in 1981 Audi signed her to drive the quattro alongside Hannu Mikkola.
That year, at the Sanremo Rally, she became the first woman to win a round of the World Rally Championship, with her Italian co-driver Fabrizia Pons beside her.
In 1982 she won three more — Portugal, the Acropolis and Brazil — and went into the final part of the season fighting Walter Röhrl for the title. A crash in the Ivory Coast ended her chances and she finished runner-up, still the closest a woman has come to being world champion.
In 1985 she won the Pikes Peak hill climb outright in the Audi Sport quattro S1 and set a record, answering those in the paddock who had said a woman could not. In 1986 she won the German championship in a Peugeot 205 T16, the other great car of Group B, and retired at the end of the year.
She co-founded the Race of Champions in 1988 in memory of her friend Henri Toivonen, killed on the Tour de Corse, and later became the first president of the FIA’s Women in Motorsport Commission. Both the quattro and the 205 T16 are in this catalogue.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
The cars
Cars in the catalog he drove, won in, or that were named after him.
