Feature Carveyance

The Borrowed Crown

How a rented Porsche 911, a two-week budget, and a cigarette company’s spare change humiliated the entire factory establishment at the 1978 Monte Carlo Rally.

Rally History  ·  Monte Carlo, 1978  ·  A True Story

We have all been there. Every one of us is carrying around at least one gloriously stupid rented-car story — the kind that felt like a slow-motion disaster in the moment and somehow ripens into your finest material a decade later.

Mine wears the badge of an Oldsmobile Alero. Two friends, one wedding in Colorado, and a white rental we pointed east out of San Francisco like it owed us money. Somewhere out on the Bonneville Salt Flats — that blinding, endless white nothing where the earth seems to run clean out of ideas — we coasted to a stop and simply did not start again. Stranded. But fortune, as it occasionally does, smiled on the spectacularly unprepared: the trunk was loaded with what I’ll generously call “refreshments,” and a frankly irresponsible arsenal of fireworks — including one rocket I remain convinced could have reached Peru. So we did the only sensible thing available to us. We quenched a considerable thirst and set the desert sky alight, and beneath that vast, indifferent cathedral of stars it was, against every law of good judgment, absolutely incredible.

We slept in the car. Woke somewhere farther out on the salt than memory could account for, marooned in the glare, and called AAA. The rescue truck made it halfway before it, too, sank into the flats — at which point the driver calmly unloaded a snow cat to haul us out, and then to haul out his own stricken truck. Three hundred dollars lighter and considerably humbler, we rejoined the living and, miraculously, made the wedding.

I’m certain you have your own version. The night you finally learned how fast it really went; how flat it could be persuaded to corner; how many human beings could be folded inside; or precisely how far it would fly off that one hill everybody in town knew about. Hold that memory close — it’s a good one, and you earned it. But I am here to tell you that none of them, not one of our beautiful, idiotic little adventures, comes within a thousand miles of what two friends did with a rented car in the January snow of 1978.

To understand the scale of what happened, you have to understand what the Monte Carlo Rally was by 1978 — and who owned it. The Monte is the oldest and most prestigious winter rally on earth, run by the Automobile Club de Monaco since 1911, and for decades the season-opening crown jewel of the World Rally Championship. It is also the most psychologically cruel event in motorsport, because it is rarely decided by who is fastest. It is decided by the sky. A single mountain stage can begin on dry tarmac, turn to cold wet, smear into mud, and finish under fresh snow and black ice — and the tyres that save you on one surface will pitch you into a ravine on the next. The Monte is a four-day gamble disguised as a race.

And by the late 1970s, the house always won. The merged Fiat-Lancia juggernaut had turned the rally into a procession: Sandro Munari and the wedge-shaped Lancia Stratos had simply collected the previous editions like overdue rent. For 1978 the Italian armada arrived heavier than ever — the howling Stratos in the hands of Munari and Bacchelli, and the brand-new Fiat 131 Abarth Alitalia fielded for a frighteningly quick young German named Walter Röhrl, alongside Verini and Darniche. Renault sent its tiny, darting works hatchbacks. Opel flooded the entry with Kadetts. Ford, Toyota, and Saab, sizing up the Italian firepower, didn’t even bother showing up, saving themselves for Sweden.

And Porsche? Porsche, the marque that had once owned this rally — Vic Elford in 1968, a famous one-two in 1969, Björn Waldegård in 1970 — had walked away from the works rally game years earlier. There would be no factory 911 in 1978. There would be no engineers from Stuttgart, no transporter, no budget, no plan. The establishment expected, reasonably, a coronation. What it got instead was a heist.

Jean-Pierre Nicolas did not have a drive. The Frenchman had just slogged through a thin, forgettable 1977 full of retirements, and as the works seats filled with younger, better-funded talent, a man of his pride might reasonably have stayed home rather than climb back down the ladder to the rungs of the privateers. Nicolas was not that proud. He wanted to do the Monte, and if the only way in was as a privateer, then a privateer he would be.

The miracle arrived with barely two weeks on the clock. Only about fifteen days before the start, the sponsorship money came through — from Gitanes, the French cigarette brand — and it was just enough to do one thing: pick up the telephone and rent a car. The call went to Montpellier, to the Alméras brothers, Jean-Marie and Jacques, two hill-climbing fanatics who built the finest privateer 911s in the world out of a workshop that ran more like a racing team than a business. They had a car. Nicolas and his co-driver could borrow it.

Here is where the genius hides, and it is the opposite of what you’d expect. The car — a 911 wearing the model badges of the era, variously called an SC or a Carrera 3.0 — was built to a deliciously clever, contradictory recipe. It carried a full Group 4 competition chassis: the stiffened, fettled, rally-hardened running gear, the proper suspension, the limited-slip, the cage. But bolted into it was only a Group 3 engine — an engine kept far closer to production tune than the highly-strung full-house race units the rules allowed.

On paper that looks like a handicap. In the snow it was a loaded weapon. The softer 3.0-litre flat-six made a relatively modest 250 or so horsepower, but it made its torque low and wide and gentle, like a rising tide rather than a thunderclap. Where the peaky works cars spun their wheels and snapped sideways the instant the road turned white, the borrowed Porsche just dug in and pulled. Hairpins that had rivals dancing on the throttle could be taken in second gear, all day long, with the unhurried confidence of a car that always knew exactly what its back end was doing. Less power. More traction. The perfect tool for exactly the weather that was coming. They painted it Gitanes blue and gold, screwed on the number 3, and went rallying on a shoestring.

Less power, more torque, and the perfect weapon for snow — the slowest engine in the fight turned out to be the secret.

If you were going to hand a tail-heavy, rear-engined car to one human being and ask him to tame a frozen mountain, you could not have chosen better. Jean-Pierre Nicolas, born in Marseille in January 1945, was the son of a rally driver and had come up through the most demanding rear-engined machinery France ever built — the Renault 8 Gordini and the giant-killing Alpine A110. He understood a car with its weight slung out behind the rear axle the way an old sailor understands wind: not as a problem to be fought, but as a force to be read and used. A snowbound 911 did not frighten him. It spoke his native language.

Beside him sat co-driver Vincent Laverne — and here is a footnote that history loves. Laverne had taken the navigator’s seat from a young man named Jean Todt, who had previously called the notes for Nicolas before moving on to other things. Those “other things” turned out to be running the Ferrari Formula 1 team through its greatest era and then presiding over the entire FIA. The man who lost the seat ran the sport; the man who kept it won the Monte.

The 46th Monte Carlo Rally opened, as tradition demanded, with the concentration runs — crews setting off from a choice of seven European cities (down from the usual nine, after too few entrants showed interest in Lisbon and London) and threading some 2,000 kilometres of public road to converge on Gap before the competitive stages began. Then the mountains did what the borrowed Porsche had been quietly built to exploit. The weather turned to chaos: dry, wet, muddy, snow, ice, sometimes within the span of a single special stage. The snowfall grew so heavy that organizers were forced to cancel stages outright.

And one by one, the favorites fell into the trap the Monte always sets. The rally became a brutal contest of tyre-reading — choose right and fly, choose wrong and find a snowbank — and the highly-strung works cars, for all their power and budget, kept choosing wrong, sliding off, or breaking. The little Renault hatchbacks, light as feathers, skipped across the packed snow. And the blue 911, with its tide of low-down torque and its driver who never once asked it to do something it didn’t want to, simply kept going, kept finding grip, kept clicking off the kilometres while the establishment unravelled behind it.

By the time the survivors reached the parc fermé at Fontvieille, the unthinkable was on the board: Nicolas led. Not by a sliver, either — better than a minute over the nearest Renault, two over the next, and more than four minutes over Röhrl’s Fiat and Darniche. Then came the rally’s savage finale, the run over the Col de Turini — the legendary 1,600-metre pass run in darkness, its hairpins lined with thousands of fans whose headlight-bright flares give the night its name: the “Night of the Long Knives.” On the partly cleared late-night roads, Röhrl finally found his rhythm and began carving back time in great furious chunks. It didn’t matter. The lead was a chasm. Nicolas won four of the final eight stages and brought the borrowed Porsche home roughly two minutes clear of the field.

And now savour the cruelty of the result, because the win itself is only half the story. Look at who climbed the podium beside the privateer Porsche. Not the mighty Stratos. Not the new 131 Abarth. Two Renault 5 Alpines — the little box-shaped hot hatchback the French had nicknamed “le skateboard,” a car with all of 97 horsepower and a kerb weight under a tonne — had skated across the ice into second and third, driven by Jean Ragnotti and Guy Fréquelin. A rented competition Porsche and a pair of warm hatchbacks had buried the most dominant works rally programme in Europe.

It was broadcast across France night after night — the spectacle of the establishment’s firepower being made to look foolish by a rented Porsche and two econobox specials. For Renault, the result was so commercially electric it helped spawn the mid-engined 5 Turbo. For Nicolas, it was the launch of the greatest year of his life.

When it was over, the borrowed car did the only thing a borrowed car can: it went home. Nicolas handed the Alméras 911 back to Montpellier with a Monte Carlo crown welded to its history, and the two brothers who had built it on a privateer’s shoestring suddenly held the most valuable calling card in rallying. And then, because the formula had been proven and the man had plainly acquired a taste for it, Nicolas simply did the whole thing over again. He turned up at the 1979 Monte in another rented Alméras Porsche — and here the sport delivered a punchline no screenwriter would have dared: the co-driver’s seat, the very one whose loss had quietly launched Jean Todt toward Ferrari and the FIA, was filled this time by Jean Todt himself, back beside the man whose notes he had once called. They brought it home seventh. Lightning, it turns out, is fussy about striking the same patch of snow twice; the weather ran drier, the soft Porsche’s foul-weather edge thinned, and the establishment had arrived loaded for precisely this ambush.

And yet the crown slipped the factories’ grasp a second straight year — because the man who took it in 1979 was, of all things, another privateer in another blue car. Bernard Darniche and Alain Mahé won the 47th Monte in a Lancia Stratos run not by the works but by Chardonnet, a French importer, campaigning a machine Turin had already officially retired. Darniche bet everything on slick tyres on the dry final night, tip-toed across the snow-shovelled summits, and won all ten stages of the last leg to steal victory by a scarcely-believable six seconds from Björn Waldegård’s works Ford — while Walter Röhrl, leading the chase, blew his engine in the closing kilometres. Two Montes, two privateers, two humiliations. The establishment had the budgets, the transporters, and the engineers; it kept losing to men who rented.

If you are hunting for the copycats, they are hiding in plain sight on the entry lists. The privateer Porsche did not turn out to be a fluke — it became a fixture. The 911 went on to take Monte Carlo class wins in 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1982, and the little Alméras workshop became the privateer’s armoury of choice, the number you called when you wanted to beat a factory without the inconvenience of owning one. The whole paddock had been handed the same uncomfortable proof, written twice in the same blue ink: you did not need a works contract to win the most prestigious rally on earth. You needed the right car for the weather the sky handed you, a driver who could read it, and the plain, stubborn nerve to enter at all.

The numbers around it only make it better. It was Porsche’s fourth Monte Carlo victory — and, to this day, its last — falling almost exactly ten years after Vic Elford’s first 911 win in the Alps. The triumph was Porsche’s best result of the 1978 season and helped carry the marque to fourth in the world championship without a single works entry; Stuttgart noticed, and quietly began pouring money back into the Alméras operation, which would go on to win the European Rally Championship in 1980. Nicolas, meanwhile, made 1978 a year for the ages, adding wins in the brutal Safari and the Ivory Coast rallies, before eventually becoming the man who ran Peugeot’s all-conquering works team in the savage Group B era. The boy raised on rear-engined Renaults grew up to command an empire of his own.

The blue 911 survives. It was restored in 2008, and in 2018 Porsche handed the keys back to a 73-year-old Jean-Pierre Nicolas at the top of the Col de Turini, asking him to drive the stage one more time. He grumbled about his joints over dinner the night before — and then drove it the next morning as though four decades had never happened, the muscle memory flooding back the instant the flat-six lit, flat out down the same frozen mountain he had conquered as a young man on borrowed everything.

Which is the whole point, really, and the reason I started with a white Alero stranded on the salt. The best car stories almost never belong to the best-prepared, the best-funded, or the most-favored. They belong to the borrowed car, the shoestring, the two-week miracle, the right read on impossible conditions, and the simple, defiant nerve to show up at all. We all have our Alero — our gloriously stupid night of refreshments and rockets and rescue trucks sinking into the salt. Jean-Pierre Nicolas had his blue 911. The only difference, in the end, is that the rest of us gave our rentals back with an apologetic shrug and a dent we hoped they wouldn’t notice. He gave his back with a crown on the roof.