On this week #30: Kalle Rovanpera
Lewis Hamilton crossed the finish line in third place at the end of last Sunday's Hungarian Grand Prix to record his 200th Formula 1 podium finish. That weekend, the number 200 also featured in another top level of motorsport in which Pirelli is the sole tyre supplier, namely the World Rally Championship. On the second day of Rally Latvia, Kalle Rovanpera, a two time world rally champion, took his 200th Special Stage win, going on to comfortably secure his third overall victory of the season, at the wheel of his Toyota, alongside co-driver Jonne Halttunen.
This was the first time that Latvia has hosted a round of the World Rally Championship, which meant many competitors had never driven these stages before. However, Rovanpera is no stranger to Latvian roads and the reason for this is an interesting tale of precocious talent and supportive parents. Kalle's father, Harri Rovanpera, was a regular WRC competitor from 1993 to 2006, driving for several factory teams and winning the 2001 Rally Sweden. “He was also my first teacher,” said the son of his father. “He taught me the car had a steering wheel, an accelerator and a clutch and then told me to get on with it.” Note that there is no mention of the brake pedal in these instructions!
When he was eight years old, Rovanpera was hustling a Toyota Starlet, specially modified so he could reach the pedals, around snow covered forest roads near his home town of Puuppola, not far from Jyvaskyla, the city that hosts Rally Finland. While it is common for kids to start racing karts at an even younger age, with rallying you need a license to drive on the road, usually not before the age of 17, as you need to get from one timed section of a rally, known as a Special Stage, by driving on the public highway. But not in Latvia…
So, at the age of 14 in 2015, he was already competing in rallies in Latvia, with his father's former co-driver Risto Pietilainen alongside him to read the pace notes and drive the public road sections. He won the R2 championship in a Citroen and the following year he entered the Latvian National Rally Championship in a Skoda WRC-2 car, winning his first rally by setting the fastest time on every stage. Switching to a more powerful Skoda midway through the season, he went on to become the youngest ever winner of a national open class rally series at the age of 16. He gained further experience competing in the Italian and Finnish rally championships and then came the next big step – on October 2 2017, one day after his 17th birthday, he was granted a dispensation by the Finnish authorities to take his driving test a year earlier than usual. He passed and that set him on the road to truly international competition, taking part a month later in the Wales Rally GB, driving a Ford Fiesta R5 in the WRC-2 category – the equivalent of Formula 2 in circuit racing terms - for the highly regarded M-Sport team. He switched to Skoda for the following two years, winning the WRC-2 title in 2019.
The time had come to join the grown-ups and 2020 saw him driving for Toyota Gazoo Racing in the premier WRC category, alongside multiple world rally champion, Sebastien Ogier. At the age of 19 years, 4 months and 16 days he became the youngest ever WRC podium finisher, with a third place finish in Rally Sweden. A year later came his first WRC win at Rally Estonia, again the youngest ever winner at the age of 21 years and 289 days, beating a record previously held by his Toyota team boss Jari-Matti Latvala. He took a further win in that year's Acropolis Rally, finishing fourth in the championship. 2022 was the year he truly stamped his authority on the sport, taking six wins on his way to becoming the youngest ever world rally champion at the age of just 22 years and 1 day. In 2023 he “only” won three events, but other strong results were enough to claim back-to-back world titles and make him the youngest double world champion in the history of rallying. This year he is not even competing in the full season. “There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest reason is that I've been driving rally for a really, really long time,” he explained. “I just found that was a good moment to take a bit of a break, to recharge the batteries and to have a bit of time off to focus on the future and to have more energy and more push in the coming years.” Despite that he has already won three times, at the Safari Rally and in Poland, prior to last weekend's Latvia victory. The two giants of the sport, the French Sebastiens, Loeb and Ogier, who top the list of most rally world titles, with 9 and 8 respectively, did not win their first crown until they were 30 and 29 respectively, so with a head start of at least seven years, who knows what Kalle Rovanpera can achieve.
While it's true that, for this week at least, the number 200 links him to a legend like Lewis Hamilton, Rovanpera actually has more in common with the drivers who stood on the top two steps of that same Budapest podium, Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris. They too are very young, extremely talented drivers who will be shaping the future of their sport for many years to come.
