There's a reason why so many world-class rally drivers come from Finland. We're not sure what that reason is, other than ordinary country roads in Finland are like WRC rally stages anywhere else. Anyway, for whatever reason, a great many Finns excel at rally driving, and none more so than rally great Rauno Aaltonen. To demonstrate his rally driving skills on a car that almost no one associates with rally driving, Rauno recently drove a BMW i3 electric car like it was a rally car.
If you haven't heard of Rauno Aaltonen don't feel bad. He was winning rally championships before most of us got our drivers' licenses. For example, he won the European Rally Championship in 1965, the Finnish Rally Championship in 1961 and 1965, and the Monte Carlo Rally in 1967. In 2010, Rauno was one of the first four inductees into the Rally Hall of Fame. He's the guy who drivers like Raikkonen, Rosberg, Hakkinen, Hirvonen, and (Tommi) Makinen looked up to.
With a 168-horsepower electric motor driving the rear wheels through a single-speed transmission, you might wonder if drifting an i3 or sliding it through turns might be difficult. For many of us, it might be. After all, the i3 is intended to travel urban streets with occasional short bursts into the suburbs, and drifting in those venues is usually frowned upon.
Then there's the practice thing. Who becomes a good drifter without lots of practice? If you drew a Venn diagram where one circle contained the drivers who love to practice drifting and the other circle included i3 owners, the intersection would most likely be pretty small.
Conventional wisdom aside, let's not forget that the i3's electric motor also produces torque—170 pound-feet of it—and most of it is available instantly when you tromp on the electron pedal. And the i3 has something else that supports drifts and slides—skinny tires.
What happens when you put 168-horsepower, 170 pound-feet of instant torque, rear-wheel drive, skinny tires and a single-speed transmission in the hands of a Finnish driving legend known as the "Rally Professor" on a dirt-covered practice rally course?
This video will show you. Enjoy.
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If you're an i3 owner who wants to lose the asphalt and look for a little dirt based on this video, you're more than welcome, but you may not get the same results that Rauno did. First of all, Euro i3s have slightly different programming than U.S. versions, but more importantly, we suspect that someone may have fiddled with the coding in Rauno's i3—like perhaps, the traction control was turned off. —Scott Blazey.
[Video and photos courtesy of DPC Cars.]
