“If only Raipe’s games had ended at that point”

Teemu Selänne was heavily fined and stopped rallying after colliding with Kalervo Kummola’s car in July 1999. Tomi Natri / AOP

– The impact against the seat belts was so hard that I lost consciousness for a while.

Thus Raimo Helminen sums up the famous rally crash from 24 years ago fresh from the oven Crispy– in his biography.

Kalervo Kummola drove a standard Toyota Camry with four passengers, one of them Helminen. Teemu Selänten below was a Toyota WRC rally driver.

Kummola’s party was in Ikaalis watching the practice of the drivers preparing for Jyväskylä. Helminen had been able to feel the rally pace aboard Selänte.

– We came back to the starting point and I said that now we are leaving, Kummola times Crispyin the book.

– We agreed that Teemu will wait until the end while we drive out of the training area.

Selänne forgot the contract with unpleasant consequences and appeared after the jump in his Camry in Kummola’s “heaven”, as Crispy-author I met Salo describes.

– Teemu’s car was coming directly towards the windshield. When I managed to turn my car around, Teemu’s car hit the left front corner of the Camry, Kummola says.

– If I hadn’t been able to turn the nose of the car, there would have been a bad result. More of us would surely have died. Even Raipe’s games would have ended at that point.

Helminen was in the back seat wearing seat belts.

– Normally, I probably would have left the seat belt unfastened in the back seat, but I had been in Selänte’s rally car a little earlier and of course I had fastened the belt there. That’s probably why I also locked it in Kummola’s car.

Kummola’s fractures and other injuries were treated in a long operation.

– The rest of us were more just freaked out by the force of the collision, Helminen sums up.

– After a while we realized that we are all in the books of the living. It could have been much worse.

Raipe (Docendo) written by Tapani Salo will be published on September 13.