Mikkola took the lead in the first leg and kept it through most of the second, despite twice having to change leaking water pumps, but two stages from the end he collected a puncture and team-mate Waldegard moved ahead. However, Escorts still held first and second places and the Ford team was delighted. But that evening a bulletin found its way on to the official notice board declaring that because a policeman in the Digne district considered that Mikkola had “overtaken dangerously some time between noon and 3 p.m. that day” the organisers were applying a penalty of five minutes, dropping the Finnish driver to fifth place. There was no actual evidence of any specific offence, merely an opinion, and the organisers took the action without even giving Mikkola a chance to speak in answer to the allegation. It was a high-handed piece of pseudo-judiciary from which the socalled sporting commissioners would not climb down, presumably lest they should lose face by reversing a decision.
As aloof as ever, they were not even prepared at first to grant audience to Mikkola and his team manager Peter Ashcroft, but eventually they allowed them to enter the inner sanctum, heard what they had to say and promptly confirmed that the five-minute penalty was there to stay. Of course, the regulations do provide for penalties for breaches of traffic law, but that is not to say that allegations of such breaches need not be proved. Mikkola could not remember any dangerous overtaking whatsoever; indeed, the only passing he could recall was when his own service car pulled over to allow him to get by.
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