Photos: WRC World Champion Juha Kankkunen’s Car Collection

This is the stunning car collection of Juha Kankkunen, winner of  23 world rallies and four drivers’ world championships and the only man to become world champion with three different manufacturers.

Talking to insideline.com about his collection Kankuunen said: “It started as a crazy idea in 1992. I wanted something physical that my family could enjoy from my career. Carlos [Sainz] has a car and Didier [Ariol] has a couple, but I wanted to go further.”

The collection is housed at the Finnish farm on which he grew up and stands as a testament to a life spent at and often beyond the limit.

One of Kankunnens’s favourite machines is the The Peugeot 205 T16 Evo 2, the very car in which he won the Swedish Rally in 1986. “In ’86 I went from a rear-wheel-drive Toyota to a four-wheel-drive Peugeot,” says Kankkunen. “It required a totally different style of driving but it only took me three months to adjust and I won the second rally I entered. When you’re a kid you can learn anything quickly.”

Kankkunen won his first World Championship with Peugeot in 1986, but the infamous Group B cars were banned a year later following the death of his close friend Henri Toivonen.

“The cars were dangerous if you gave them to a normal driver,” reckons Kankkunen, “but the professional drivers could handle them. We knew what was happening. The step to the Group A cars that followed was too big. It was like going from Formula 1 to Formula Ford.”

Images: Insideline.com