Those who lived through the madness of rallying in the 1980s say it was a unique time. Rally cars with more than 500 hp, equipped with the best that technology had to offer.
In a nutshell, a car category, the offspring of the economic prosperity and technical freedom fostered by the FIA.
The brands had no technical or financial limitations and did everything they could to make Group B cars faster and faster. They called them “Formula 1 of the roads”. A nickname that was not born in vain, and that was fueled by myths, but which unfortunately are just good stories to tell your friends.
In addition to being powerful, Group B were difficult to manage. Now add to this equation a public not very clear about the dangers they were running… it was a matter of time before a tragedy happened.
The fear that some tragedy might happen came true in Portugal on March 5, 1986, in one of the darkest episodes in the history of the World Rally Championship: the tragedy of the Blue Lagoon.
In the Sintra area, almost half a million people gathered to see the Rally de Portugal pass. The edges of the Serra de Sintra, Lagoa Azul, were transformed into makeshift stands to see, hear and feel the emotion of the rally cars. Benches that unfortunately weren't enough for everyone. It was practically impossible for the organizers and the police to control a human mass of that size.
It was right away in the 1st special classification that Joaquim Santos, by avoiding some spectators, lost control of his Ford RS200 and rammed the crowd that was in that area. A woman and her nine-year-old son died immediately. More than 30 people were injured.
That same day, the official pilots met at the Hotel Estoril-Sol and drew up a communiqué that they handed over to the organization, where they unanimously decided to abandon the race.
It was the form of protest found by the pilots to express their displeasure with the lack of safety conditions. Walter Röhrl was leading the protest, but the communiqué would be read by Henri Toivonen.
In this document (in the image above), the pilots invoked three reasons for not continuing in the test: respect for the victims' families; there are no means to guarantee the safety of spectators; the fact that the fatal accident was caused by the driver's deviation from spectators who were on the road and not by conditions inherent to the car (mechanical anomaly).
Just a month later, Henri Toivonen, subscriber of the Hotel Estoril-Sol communiqué, would suffer a fatal accident on the Corsica Rally. The following year, Group B ended. Here is the sharing of a historical record that marked the beginning of the end of an era. An era that will be remembered forever, for the best and the worst reasons…