Janina Depping

Janina (left) with Ina Schaarschmidt

Janina Depping was one of Germany’s foremost female rally drivers of the early 2000s. She is most associated with the Mitusbishi Lancer.

She took part in seven World Championship rallies during her seventeen-year career: three of them were the 2004, 2007 and 2011 editions of the Rallye Deutschland. The best of these for her was the 2011 Rallye, when she finished 38th overall but ninth in class, driving a Lancer Evo IX. Her earliest WRC experience was in 1997, when she was just nineteen. She competed in the Rallye Sanremo and the Tour de Corse in a Ford Escort and Skoda Felicia respectively. She would revisit these two rallies once more, finishing the 1998 Sanremo event in a Mitsubishi Carisma.

Earlier, she had been eighth in a pre-WRC Rallye Deutschland, in 1999. Her car was a Ford Escort RS Cosworth; she would have one of the best seasons of her career in it. That year, she was also fifth in the International ADMV-Pneumant-Rallye and seventh in the Van Staveren-Zuiderzeerally, as well as recording top-ten finishes in five other rallies. She was eighth in that year’s German championship.

The early success she experienced in her career came from having started young. Janina grew up around rallies: her father Bernd Depping competed in the 1980s when she was a child and her uncle Dieter Depping was a multiple German champion in the 1990s, sometimes with Janina’s aunt, also called Janina, as co-driver. She began rallying herself in 1996, at 18. Her first event was the Baumholder Hunsruck National Rally, held on the same military range as Rallye Deutschland. She drove the Escort, although she quickly switched to a Suzuki Swift for the rest of the year and some of 1997. 

Her only outright win came in 1999. She was the victor in the Hunsruck Junior Rallye, driving a Proton Wira.  

In 2008, she was runner-up in the Group N class of the European Rally Challenge, after a string of strong finishes. She competed in the Netherlands and Belgium that year as well as Germany, driving a Lancer Evo VII, a car she used for five seasons, including a second one in the ERC in 2009. Her best finish that year was a tenth place in the Lausitz Rallye. Sadly, her events in the Netherlands and Italy led to retirement. 

After a year off in 2010, she returned to the stages in 2011, and was 38th in the Rallye Deutschland in a new Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX. Later in the year, she was seventh in the ADAC Rallyesprint.eu, against 59 other drivers.

In 2012, she used the same car in a mixture of German championship rallies. She was second and fourth in the two ADMV Wedemerk Rallye events, ninth in the Sachsen Rallye and eighth in the Rallye Erzgebirge. This represented a return to form after a couple of years spent more on the sidelines.

In 2013, she continued to compete in German events, recording an eighth place in the Sachsen Rallye and a class win on the Grabfeld Rallye, twelfth overall.

Sadly, she died following an accident on the Wartburg Rallye, in which her co-driver Ina Schaarschmidt also perished. Janina’s Lancer Evo IX had hit a tree at high speed and caught fire. Ina died at the scene and Janina succumbed to her injuries four days later. The pair had been working together since 2011.

(Image copyright Sascha Dorrenbacher)