Kimi Raikkonen, Robert Kubica and Heikki Kovalainen. All three are Formula 1 race winners, and even shared the podium at the 2008 Malaysian Grand Prix. But their common experience doesn’t end there.
Each of the trio has also tested their skills in the World Rally Championship, with Raikkonen and Kubica claiming a respectable best finish of fifth from their combined 54 outings. Two-time All-Japan Rally champion Kovalainen finished tenth overall and fourth in class at the WRC’s Rally Japan in 2022. And they’re certainly not the only grand prix aces to be bitten by the rallying bug.
Having made regular appearances on the Arctic Rally Lapland between 2019 and 2021, Sauber racer Valtteri Bottas has shown plenty of interest in the discipline, while Carlos Sainz’s rallying roots and appearance on the 2018 Monte Carlo in a zero car suggests he may be open to following in his father’s footsteps after his F1 career.
Should he and Bottas one day take the plunge and enter a WRC event, they would join a club of ex-F1 drivers to make the crossover which also counts Carlos Reutemann, twice a podium finisher on Rally Argentina. To their number should be added Stephane Sarrazin, who entered the 1999 Brazilian GP for Minardi and another Faenza alumnus Jos Verstappen, the father of treble world champion Max making his WRC debut on the Ypres Rally in 2022.
Had things played out differently over the winter of 2004, Tomas Enge could well have a membership of that club too. The former Prost F1 racer believes it’s entirely realistic that he could have switched codes permanently to rallying, pivoting away from a sportscar racing career that had already yielded a class victory at Le Mans, had he not been obliged to pass up a programme of selected tarmac events in a full WRC-spec Subaru Impreza for the Prodrive-run works team that year.
When his manager Antonin Charouz reached a deal with the start-up Ma-Con team to bring the 27-year-old back for a fifth full season in the International Formula 3000 championship, Enge is clear it wasn’t what he wanted.
“I was massively disappointed,” he tells Autosport. “I really looked forward to it and I really wanted to continue in rallying on a more professional way.
“I always dreamed to do rally in the past. When I did Formula 3000, the only thing I was playing on PlayStation was Colin McRae Rally. I didn’t play Formula 1 or anything else.
“I’d play Colin McRae and it was only offline so you would play against yourself. I beat my records constantly. I knew where I could cut and I got no penalty, I knew the roads without pacenotes. That’s how crazy I was. I was visiting [events] constantly when I had time between races.”
After three F1 starts with Alain Prost’s moribund team at the end of 2001, wrestling with a Ferrari-powered AP04 that lacked power steering and development relative to its rivals, Enge had headed back to F3000 with Christian Horner’s Arden team for 2002. At the same time, he forged a relationship with Prodrive – previously an Arden technical partner – that led to an involvement in its sportscar programme with the Ferrari 550 Maranello as a third driver for the longer distance races.
"I drove the Mitsu on snow, first time without experience in pacenotes. That’s how crazy I was about rally" Tomas Enge
“Somehow Christian talked to either David Richards or George Howard-Chappell and somehow I got involved with Prodrive at the same time I got involved with Arden,” recalls Enge. “So that was kind of lucky.”
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After a rough start to his F3000 campaign in Brazil when his car ran out of fuel, Enge emerged as a force during the first year of the B02/50 chassis and scored Arden’s first win by leading a 1-2 in Austria. By season’s end he’d added three more victories, and won the title on the road in a tense showdown at the Monza finale.
But before that weekend, the news had broken that he’d failed a random drugs test at the Hungaroring. Victory and the 10 points that came with it were scotched from his tally, which cost him the title to Sebastien Bourdais. With his future in doubt, Enge took matters into his own hands and set about making his rallying dream a reality.
“After what happened at the end of 2002, I didn’t know what was going to happen in 2003,” he recalls. “I said in December 2002, ‘that’s it, I’m going to Norway to do a rally on snow’.”
A friend sourced him a Subaru for the Mountain Rally Norway that Enge found “difficult to shift, difficult to brake, quite hard to drive” in a pre-event test. After trying its owner’s Mitsubishi, he elected to swap.
“I jumped out and said, ‘I want this car, it’s so enjoyable, how much more do you want me to pay?’” Enge grins. “We made a deal and I drove the Mitsu on snow, first time without experience in pacenotes. That’s how crazy I was about rally.
“We did the first stage Friday evening, 25km in the dark – a long stage! I was slower than the local heroes, but we got through the rally, some people went off and we finished ninth in the Group N class, so not bad.”
Enge didn’t treat it as a one-off either. He showed he was serious about rallying during a busy 2003 season in which he combined outings with the 550 Maranello in the American Le Mans Series, five FIA GT starts in MenX Racing’s Ferrari 360 and regular appearances in domestic rallies for a Czech team, Styllex Tuning Prosport.
“The owner didn’t want to race anymore but he had sponsors that wanted to continue,” Enge explains. “It was crazy, every weekend gone, flying all over the place.”
His rally exploits were predominantly in the burly Skoda Octavia, a car Enge says was “not the fastest, but it was really suitable for beginners”, while he also drove a 2001-spec Ford Focus that he compares to a go-kart that was “more for experienced drivers because you need to be precise”.
With momentum building behind Enge’s rallying career, he even tested a WRC-spec Impreza at MIRA, where Prodrive completed its shakedowns. The run though was “only a few kilometres” on tarmac with gravel tyres and suspension set-up and Enge says it didn’t give him much of an impression about how he would have clicked with it.
“I can’t say whether the Subaru would fit my driving style, it’s a massive question mark,” he says. Still, he was hopeful of a deal being put together for 2004 to run a current-spec Subaru in national rallies before entering tarmac events in the WRC later in the season.
“The plan was to start the season in 2004 with Subaru in the Czech championship and then going on to do maybe Corsica Rally or Sanremo after getting some more experience with this car and doing some tests with Prodrive,” he says. “The deal for the Czech Rally Championship was already on the table to do the first rally in January with a Ford Focus and then March in 2004, already second rally of the Czech championship with a Subaru.
“But in that period of time when I did the rally in January, in Austria with the Focus, February suddenly came the news ‘you’re going back to F3000’. Instead of me it was Stephane Sarrazin being chosen.”
Sarrazin’s three-round programme with a year-old car entered by the French Federation peaked with fourth in Corsica in 2004, then continued into a second and third season with current-spec equipment. The pair had previously been team-mates at the West Competition McLaren-backed F3000 team in 2000 and would go on to work together again at the Prodrive-run Aston Martin Racing operation in 2005-06. There are no hard feelings towards the Frenchman as a result, but all the same Enge wishes he’d had the opportunity instead of spending another year in F3000 with nothing to prove.
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He headed for the Indy Racing League in 2005, showing speed by qualifying third on debut at Homestead and second at Texas in what would prove his sole season in US open-wheel racing, before concentrating on sportscars and A1GP. He entered seven domestic rallies with a Mitsubishi in 2009, began entering historic rallies in 2016 and contested the Dakar Rally in 2021.
"I still have this on my bucket list, to do a World Championship rally. I would like to have it done as well as Le Mans, Indycar, Dakar and F1" Tomas Enge
“It could have been me, experiencing those times in a World Rally Team of Subaru,” he says ruefully. “I could have been the first Czech being in Formula 1 and then a World Championship rally. I was still relatively young and I was experienced with high-speed racecars. The only thing I needed to figure out or experience was new roads and get used to them.
“When I did the first rallies in 2003, that my biggest disadvantage is obviously not knowing the roads. And in Czech Republic, everybody knows the roads from several years up and down, going this way, the other way. And same in the World Championship.”
Enge was once more a regular in the Czech championship in 2023, and drove his Toyota Yaris as a course car on the Central European Rally as the new event split between the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany made its WRC debut. Plans for another season with the car in the Czech championship, along with a CER return in a competitive capacity, are in the works.
“I still have this on my bucket list, to do a World Championship rally,” he says. “I would like to have it done as well as Le Mans, Indycar, Dakar and F1.”
Could this be the year that Enge finally scratches his 20-year itch? Come October and the start of the CER, there will be many rooting for whatever car Enge lands himself in. Even if that is ‘only’ the zero car once more.
