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Rally raids are supposed to go to whoever survives the desert fastest. The 1989 Paris-Dakar Rally went to whichever Peugeot driver called the right side of a 10-franc coin. Team orders are old news in racing, and most of them come from a strategist or a stern word from the boss. This one came from a pocket full of change.
The two men in that toss were Ari Vatanen, the 1981 world rally champion, and Jacky Ickx, who had already won Le Mans six times. His one Dakar win had come in 1983, in a Mercedes G-Wagen. Both were driving Peugeot 405 Turbo 16s. Both were fast enough that their own team manager started to worry about which one would end up on his roof in the sand first, hundreds of miles from the nearest proper hospital.
Two Peugeots, One Desert
Peugeot arrived as the team to beat. Jean Todt, who would later run Ferrari's Formula 1 team and then the FIA, had built a rally-raid program that won the Dakar in 1987 and again in 1988. The 405 T16 shared a name with Peugeot's family sedan and very little else, with a turbocharged engine mounted behind the driver and four-wheel drive. The same model had carried Vatanen to a record run up Pikes Peak in 1988. Todt had two drivers who knew how to use every bit of it.
Vatanen had reason to feel cursed going in. He was leading the 1988 rally when thieves stole his car from a stadium in Mali and held it for ransom, and Peugeot refused to pay. The car turned up too late, and organizers disqualified him for missing his start time. Juha Kankkunen, another Finn, won that year in a Peugeot instead.
The 1989 edition started badly too. According to Motor Sport, he rolled his 405 during the prologue in Barcelona on December 26 and spent the next several weeks reeling in Ickx across roughly 7,000 miles of North and West Africa. Of the 473 competitors who started that year, only 209 made it to the finish, which was a record at the time.
Ten Francs, Tails Up
Between them, Vatanen and Ickx won 10 of the rally's 18 stages. Their teammate duel pushed both cars harder than the rest of the field required, since the only drivers who could realistically beat a Peugeot were sitting in the other Peugeot. When Vatanen rolled again in the Ténéré desert, Todt decided he'd seen enough.
Six days before the finish, he issued team orders and let a coin decide who they favored. Ickx called heads and Vatanen took tails. It landed tails. Both drivers accepted the result as a gentleman's agreement, with the loser expected to ease off and follow the winner home.
Todt's worry was practical. Two drivers flat out through soft sand and rock made a wreck more likely, and one bad crash could cost Peugeot the win or put someone in a hospital. He also knew Vatanen had nearly been killed in a crash at Rally Argentina in 1985, an accident that kept him out of competition for well over a year. Motor Sport's March 1989 issue ran the result under the headline Peugeot's Paris-Dakar toss-up.
The Deal Held, Barely
The coin didn't calm things down right away. Ickx was supposed to hold station behind his teammate, and then Vatanen made a mistake on the second-to-last stage. Ickx went past and took the lead by about 20 seconds heading into the final run from Saint-Louis to Dakar. For a few hours, it looked like the coin might not matter at all.
On that last section, Ickx gave the time back. Vatanen reached the finish 3 minutes and 44 seconds ahead, and a driver who had been in front the day before settled for second. Vatanen won the next year with Peugeot and in 1991 with Citroën. In 2009 he ran against Todt for the FIA presidency and lost, 135 votes to 49.
Ickx had seen this kind of arrangement before. He was on the grid at the 1967 United States Grand Prix as a 22-year-old in a Cooper, and he dropped out with an overheating engine. The night before that race, Ford executive Walter Hayes suggested that Lotus teammates Jim Clark and Graham Hill flip a coin. The winner of the toss would take the race if they ran one-two. Hill won the toss, and the drivers agreed to swap the favor at the next race in Mexico. His clutch froze during the race, and Clark crossed the line six seconds ahead on a sagging right rear wheel after a suspension support broke with less than three laps left.
