‘She was a proven winner’: Michèle Mouton and the history of women in motorsport

Michèle Mouton competed in World Rally Championships 40 years ago, yet she remains the last woman to have competed at the highest level of the sport – and the only one to win. Mick O’Hare tells her story

Mouton at the Malboro Safari rally in Nairobi in 1983, in which she and her co-driver Fabrizia Pons finished third (AFP/Getty)

Forty years ago a woman signed to drive for Audi in the World Rally Championship (WRC). She would take part in 50 events and repay Audi’s faith by finishing runner-up in the competition in 1982. Yet ­despite sporadic privateer entries at the lower reaches of the WRC field, Michèle Mouton remains the last woman to have competed at the highest level of the sport, the only woman to have been signed by a leading team and the only woman ever to have won a world championship rally. Why? Well, why indeed?

Based purely on officially sanctioned Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) world motorsport championships, Mouton is emphatically the greatest woman driver ever. In addition to four WRC wins, the Frenchwoman also raced in the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans and, as part of an all-female team, won her class in 1975. She was runner-up in the European Rally Championship in 1977 before Audi came calling. She then narrowly missed out on the 1982 world title to double champion German Walter Röhrl, losing by a mere 12 points but, along with teammate Hannu Mikkola, delivered Audi’s first world manufacturers’ crown.

Later in her career, she would win the notorious Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in the US and the 1986 German Rally Championship, the first woman to win a major rally title. At the time, it seemed she would be a trailblazer for females in motorsport, as the role and dynamic of women in general was changing rapidly. Feminism was driving emancipation and society was witnessing a wholesale transformation in attitudes to women in both the working environment and sport. Yet here we are in 2020 and, incredibly, Michèle Mouton remains an outlier, an exception.