Only Renault, with the Alpine R5, and Opel with the Kadett GT/E, popular with private drivers and the only model to outnumber the 911 with more than 50 cars at the start, challenged the Italian cars. In the 'squadron' made up of Porsche 911 teams, one of the most experienced drivers was the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Nicolas, a driver with great expertise with rear-engined cars, having already scored several victories with the Renault 8 Gordini and the Alpine A110. Nicolas had just completed a mediocre 1977 season marked by a number of withdrawals. He and his navigator, Vincent Laverne, weren't sure they would be able to take part in the event only two weeks before the start, when the sponsor Gitanes confirmed that the budget would allow the team to hire a 911 Carrera RS 3.0 Group 4 prepared by the Alméras brothers, the ideal model for this type of event. The objective was to relive the glory days of 1970, the year in which Porsche won its last Monte Carlo event thanks to Björn Waldegaard's 911S and took the first international manufacturers' championship, subsequently renamed the World Rally Championship (WRC) in 1973. What's more, the 1978 'Monte' was the first event to be counted for the Drivers' FIA Cup, which had been introduced the previous year and was replaced in 1979 by a genuine Drivers' World Championship, whose calendar was unified with that of the manufacturers. Starting with a concentration stage, the crews set off from a town selected from a list of European capitals, driving some 2,000 km over two days before arriving in Gap on Sunday evening, where the rally itself began on Monday morning. In 1978 the number of departure cities was reduced from nine to seven, because of a lack of entries in Lisbon and London. In addition, heavy snowfall meant that some of the routes had to be changed. Nicolas and Laverne chose to start in Monte Carlo itself and to cover a "loop" that would take them to Angoulême and back.