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Monte Carlo Rally

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Monte Carlo Rally

The Monte Carlo Rally or Rallye Monte-Carlo (officially Rallye Automobile Monte-Carlo) is a rallying event organized each year by the Automobile Club de Monaco.

From its inception in 1911 by Prince Albert I, the rally was intended to demonstrate improvements and innovations in automobiles, and promote Monaco as a tourist resort on the Mediterranean shore. Before the format changed in 1997, the event was a “concentration rally” in which competitors would set off from various starting points around Europe and drive to Monaco, where the rally would continue to a set of special stages.

The rally now takes place along the hills of the French Riviera and southeast France (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and the southern parts of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes). In 2026, for the first time since the 2008 Monte Carlo Rally, the event returned to within the borders of Monaco for a Super Special Stage.

In 1909, an association named Sport Automobile et Vélocipédique de Monaco (which became the Automobile Club de Monaco in 1925) started planning a car rally at the behest of Albert I, Prince of Monaco. The Monte Carlo Rally was to start at points all over Europe and converge on Monte Carlo. In January 1911, 23 cars set out from 11 different locations, and Henri Rougier was among the nine who left Paris to cover a 1,020 kilometres (634 mi) route. The event was won by Rougier in a Turcat-Méry 25 Hp. The rally comprised both driving and then somewhat arbitrary judging based on the elegance of the car, passenger comfort and the condition in which it arrived in the principality. The outcry of scandal when the results were published changed nothing, so Rougier was proclaimed the first winner.

Following the Second World War, works or works-supported teams became more and more important. From 1949 onwards, there was a special Team prize. First winners were the three Allards of Potter, Godsall and Imhof. Simca, Delahaye, Sunbeam-Talbot and Jaguar were subsequent winners. Sydney Allard – as the first and only winner driving his own car – was driving a "works" car in 1952, but Gatsonides also participated in a factory prepared Ford Zephyr in 1953, a year that saw no fewer than eight factory backed Sunbeam-Talbots.

The 1966 event was the most controversial in the history of the Rally. The first four finishers, driving three Mini-Coopers, Timo Mäkinen, Rauno Aaltonen and Paddy Hopkirk, and Roger Clark's 4th-placed Ford Cortina were all disqualified because they used non-dipping single filament quartz iodine bulbs in their headlamps, in place of the standard double filament dipping glass bulbs, which are fitted to the series production version of each models sold to the public. This elevated Pauli Toivonen (Citroën ID) into first place overall. Toivonen himself found the situation so embarrassing that he refused to accept his award. Rosemary Smith (Hillman Imp) was also disqualified from sixth place, after winning the Coupe des Dames, the ladies' class. In all, ten cars were disqualified. Teams threatened to boycott the event. The headline in Motor Sport read "The Monte Carlo Fiasco".

From 1973 to 2008, the rally was held in January as the first event of the FIA World Rally Championship. Between 2009 and 2011, it was the opening round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC) programme, a championship for N/A 4WD cars, before returning to the WRC championship season again in 2012. As recently as 1991, competitors were able to choose their starting points from approximately five venues roughly equidistant from Monte Carlo (one of Monaco's administrative areas) itself.

With often varying conditions at each starting point (typically comprising dry tarmac, wet tarmac, snow, and ice, sometimes all in a single stage of the rally), this event places a big emphasis on tyre choices, as a driver has to balance the need for grip on ice and snow with the need for grip on dry tarmac. For the driver, this is often a difficult choice as the tyres that work well on snow and ice normally perform poorly on dry tarmac.

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