Kalle Rovanpera - rallying's youngest champion

[Danny0405]

One point to notice also about Kalle is it shows how the job done by Makinen was great.
He created a structure from scratch quite late after Toyota has changed its strategy, he made some controversial choices that globally worked (Latvala instead of Mikkelsen, Lappi instead of Suninen), installed a very good technical director (Fowler) and he prepared the future because he was the one who did the job to attract Rovanpera (giving him tests in the WRC car, clear decision from him to put him in 2020 that was known as soon as summer 2019).
Ok, some can say it was easy as he is Finnish and Rovanpera was obvious but apparently, it was not the case for Hyundai (I’m not talking about M-Sport which didn’t have the means to attract him on a long-term basis but have tried in 2017).

He suffered one blow (Tanak leaving) because of his personality that was covered by Toyota money to take Ogier and made one controversial choice that ended up as a mistake (Meeke) but globally, his job was excellent.

Trivia statistics: Kalle is already 10th in the rankings of Finnish with most WRC wins (but he will probably climbs a lot)