Fabrizia Pons

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Kleinschmidt / Pons (left) in the VW Race Touareg (2005)

Fabrizia Pons (born June 26, 1955 in Turin ) is an Italian rally driver and co-driver. Alongside Jean-Claude Lefèbvre, she is the only one of the rally co-drivers who was also able to score points in the World Rally Championship on the steering wheel . With Michèle Mouton she became vice world champion in 1982.

Career

Fabrizia Pons scored championship points with an Opel Kadett GT / E

Motocross and rally (1969–1977)

Pons started riding motocross at the age of 14 but didn't achieve much success. After a serious accident, she was operated on three times on her ankle. After her doctor had forbidden her further starts with the motorcycle , she started rallying. Pons first took part as a driver in events of the Italian championship in 1976. There she achieved class victories. In her first world championship run that year she came in 29th place at the Sanremo Rally . The following year she moved from the previous Italian vehicles on the Opel Kadett GT / E . At the rallies for the European Rally Championship in Italy she came in 13th, 14th, 25th, 33rd and 45th with Anna Gatti as co-driver. In Sanremo , she did not finish as the only time in her driving career.

World Rally Championship (1978-2000)

Pons scored points as a driver in the World Championship rally in Sanremo in 1978 and came in ninth there. At her European Championship starts she came in 15th, 17th, 21st and 30th. Her co-pilot was Gabriella Zappia. In 1979 she started once at the San Marino Rally and then permanently moved to the position of co-driver. As such she came with Franco Berruto at the Rallye Monte Carlo 1978 on the 80th place (the 18th place in her class), with failures in 1977 and 1979 (with Roger Grimaud).

With Luigi Battistolli, Pons was able to collect European Championship points in 1979: a victory in the ÖASC rally, a second and an eighth place with two failures. Another victory came with the Mitropa rally Munich-Vienna-Budapest. In the following year they only reached the goal once with a sixth place in an EM run.

Mouton and Pons in the Audi Sport quattro (1984)

After Pons thought Michèle Mouton's first request was a joke, she became co-driver of the well-known rally driver in 1981. They drove for five years for world championship points in an Audi quattro and saw the development of the vehicle from start to finish. A fourth place in Portugal, a 13th in Finland and the first victory of a women's team at the Sanremo Rally were the result of the first year. At the 1982 Monte Carlo Rally they retired due to an accident. A fifth place followed in Sweden. In Portugal, Greece and Brazil, Pons Mouton steered towards victory. In between was a seventh place in Corsica and a failure due to a broken oil pipeline in New Zealand. After a fourth place in Finland, the women's team was on course for the World Championship. But on the Ivory Coast they were eliminated by accident, while Walter Röhrl won. After a final second place in the RAC rally , Mouton / Pons were a few points behind Röhrl / Geistdörfer in the final score .

Mouton / Pons finished 5th without a rally victory in 1983, although their first three starts with the Quattro A2 ended with fire, rollover and engine failure. In the following year, Röhrl also drove in the Audi works team. He and Mouton received the new Sport quattro , which proved to be susceptible to damage. In the final accounts, Mouton / Pons were in 12th place - one point behind Röhrl, while their teammate Stig Blomqvist won the world championship with the old model . Mouton / Pons won the 1984 Open Rally Class at the Pikes Peak hill climb in the USA. In 1985, both of them drove only European championship races and two rallies in Ireland and Wales for the Audi Sport UK team . In addition to second place in Wales, her balance sheet was: chassis damage, failure, loss of a wheel, gearbox damage, loader damage and an accident at the end.

The 1986 Corsica Rally of Mouton / Pons on a Peugeot 205 was ended by a gearbox failure. Pons got married and Mouton retired after the Group B cars were banned at the end of the season. Pons competed in two rallies as a driver in 1985 and 1986. She won the Lady Rally dei Castelli Malatestiani, which was reserved for women . As a young mother, she was a co-driver in several historic rallies between 1990 and 1993.

Pons returned to professional sport in 1994. She navigated Piero Longhi to two wins and a second place in EM races. She then applied to Ari Vatanen , with whom she drove for world championship points again. A third place in Argentina, two fifth places and two accidents were the results of the year. With Vatanen, she won the 1995 Pirelli International Rally and second place in the Hong Kong Beijing Rally of the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship (APRC). The following year she became co-pilot of Piero Liatti , with whom she was on the second podium in Indonesia and Catalonia. The three years with Pons on the Subaru factory team were the most successful in Liatti's career. They repeatedly made it into the top three and from 1996 to 1998 they finished fifth, sixth and seventh in the overall ranking of the World Rally Championship. In 1997, Pons Liatti navigated the legendary Monte Carlo Rally to victory. They won again in 2000 at the Rally della Lana, which is part of the European Rally Championship .

Rally Raids (1995-2005)

With Ari Vatanen, Pons had contested three successful marathon rallies in 1995 . Six years later, Pons and Jutta Kleinschmidt met for Michèle Mouton's 50th birthday and agreed on a future collaboration in the Volkswagen factory team. When they took part in the Dakar Rally from 2003 to 2005, they achieved two stage wins. After an eighth place in the overall ranking in 2003, they were able to stop the success of the women's team Kleinschmidt / Thörner from 1999 with third place (first podium for a diesel vehicle) in 2005 .

Rallies (2007-2020)

In the years from 2007 to 2013, Pons navigated in a few selected rallies that were neither for world nor European championship points. This included the Classic Rally of Otago in New Zealand. Her drivers were Alessandro Fiorio in 2007 , Michèle Mouton in 2008, Piero Liatti in 2010, Ari Vatanen in 2011 and Miki Biasion in 2013 . Mouton and Pons were in the lead in 2008 until an engine failure forced them to give up.

Since 2014, Pons has participated in many historic rallies as co-driver. Mostly her driver was Luigi Battistolli, with whom she won the European championship of historical rallies in 2019. With Alberto Battistolli, she completed a rally in Romania in February 2020.

Opinions

Pons said of the first win with Mouton that everyone, especially the men, but to a certain extent also Team Audi, were surprised. Some would have viewed him negatively. Before this rally, where he finished seventh, Ari Vatanen said: "I can and will never lose to a woman."

More than twenty years later, said Vatanen, the years with Pons were "the golden period of his life": "At home, I followed the instructions from Rita and in the car's orders Fabrizia!" He estimated their precision as their prayer book led , never overlooked a note, and its perfection. Where each of his passengers would have dug their wallet out of the bag behind the seats, Pons had stuck the coin for the road tolls in the appropriate place in the prayer book. Vatanen: “It was a pleasure to work with Fabrizia. Perhaps I needed this experience to appreciate what it is like to have a female passenger shouting out the notes in soft tones that have a downright calming effect on a driver's safety! Nevertheless, depending on the situation, she was able to accelerate the pace with the greatest precision and then decrease it again. "

Private

Pons completed a degree in architecture . She worked as an architect for a year and a half, including with designers and engineers from Pininfarina . After their marriage in 1986, she temporarily stopped rallying and became the mother of a son and a daughter. Since then she has been singing soprano in a choir in her free time , with which she has also recorded a compact disc .

statistics

World Rally Championship

Rally victories

Remarkable

  • 1982 Vice World Champion with Michèle Mouton
  • 1977 Sanremo Rally, 9th place (as driver) with Gabriella Zappia

Marathon rallies (rally raids)

  • 1995 Rally Tunisia, 3rd place with Ari Vatanen
  • 1995 Atlas Rally in Morocco, overall victory with Ari Vatanen
  • 1995 Baja Portugal (Baja 1000), overall victory with Ari Vatanen
  • 2003 Dakar Rally , 8th place overall with Jutta Kleinschmidt
  • 2004 Dakar Rally, 21st place overall with Jutta Kleinschmidt (a stage win)
  • 2005 Dakar Rally, 3rd place overall with Jutta Kleinschmidt (a stage win)
  • 2005 Baja Portalegre 500, 2nd overall with Jutta Kleinschmidt

European Rally Championship

Rally victories

  • 1979 ÖASC rally, with Luigi Battistolli
  • 1994 Rally del Ciocco e Valle del Serchio, with Piero Longhi
  • 1994 Rally 1000 Miglia, with Piero Longhi
  • 1997 Madeira Rally, with Piero Liatti
  • 2000 Rallye della Lana, with Piero Liatti

Historic European Rally Championship

  • 2019 European Champion with Luigi Battistolli (grade 4)

Others

  • 1984 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, victory in the Open Rally Class with Michèle Mouton
  • 1985 Lady Rally dei Castelli Malatestiani, victory as a driver
  • 1995 Pirelli International Rally, victory with Ari Vatanen.

Own publications

  • with Maurizia Baresi: Blu notte azzurro rally . Edinform, November 1983, p. 128, (Italian).

Web links

Commons : Fabrizia Pons  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Notes and sources

  1. ^ A b c d e Stephan Heublein: Fabrizia Pons - As successful as no other . From: motorsport-magazin.com , May 18, 2005, accessed June 25, 2020.
  2. ↑ a b c d e ewrc-results.com: Driver profile of Fabrizia Pons , accessed on June 26, 2020.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l ewrc-results.com: Profile of Fabrizia Pons as passenger , accessed on June 26, 2020.
  4. ↑ For her overall victory and track record in 1985, Mouton was alone in the vehicle.
  5. ^ Autoweek, Detroit: Audi's Mountain. November 30, 2009 (English).
  6. ↑ Kleinschmidt won the 2001 Dakar Rally with Andreas Schulz as co-driver.
  7. ^ The Daily Post, Rotorua: By the Numbers. January 25, 2008 (English).
  8. ↑ Mick O'Hare: 'She was a proven winner': Michèle Mouton and the history of women in motorsport. In: The Independent , June 20, 2020 (English).
  9. ↑ Fabrizia Pons. In: arivatanenrally.com , accessed June 20, 2020 (Finnish).
  10. ↑ Fabrizia Pons talks to Cristiana Oprea about ingredients of success, social media, architecture, and chance. In: Femei în Motorsport , March 1, 2020, accessed on June 24, 2020.
  11. ↑ a b c d arivatanenrally.com: Rallies. (English, accessed June 24, 2020)
personal data
SURNAME Pons, Fabrizia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian rally navigator
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Turin , Italy