Walter Röhrl was born on March 7 in 1947, making him one of the fastest 66-year olds alive — we should know, he scared the life out of us around Portugal’s Estoril circuit a couple of years ago in a turbocharged Porsche 911 driving at competition speeds.
The man’s lost none of his racing edge, competing regularly at rallies, circuit events, track days, and some seriously treacherous events such as the Targa Tasmania and the Pikes Peak Hillclimb too.
Nowadays Röhrl is mostly busy as one of Porsche’s chief development and test drivers, and he tends to spend a lot of time lapping the Nürburgring in anger at the wheel of whatever flat-engined corker Stuttgart is cooking up next.
He started driving precisely 50 years ago at the age of 16, blitzing the hilly roads around his native Bavaria, and his birth town of Regensburg. Five years later Röhrl competed in his first rally and by the Seventies he established himself as the favourite at any European rally.
Throughout that decade and into the Eighties Röhrl bagged a tally of 14 WRC victories for five different marques — Fiat, Audi, Opel, Lancia and Audi — collecting two championship trophies on the way too, in 1980 and 1982. Let’s not forget, however, that in his day ten or 15 drivers were competing for wins, whereas today it’s two or three.
Some of his most notable successes include winning the daunting Monte Carlo Rally four times with four different marques (three times he won the Monte at first attempts in different machinery), and grabbing that second WRC title behind the wheel of a rear-wheel drive Opel Ascona against superior all-wheel drive opposition from the works Audi team.
Three-time Formula 1 world champion Niki Lauda called Röhrl a genius on wheels, while the French elected him, “Rally driver of the millennium”, and the Italians felt it necessary to twice vote him into the record books, once as “Rally driver of the century” and again as “Best Rally driver ever”.
Most recently, in 2011, Röhrl was inducted into the Rally Hall of Fame, and these days you’ll probably find him seated in the Porsche 918 Spyder readying it for competition with Ferrari’s Enzo successor and the McLaren P1. If age is just a number, then Walter Röhrl is infinity plus one.
