A Record Tumbles

It's a wonderful feeling, being proven right. Five years ago, I jumped on a train to Berwick upon Tweed to watch the Jim Clark Rally. After much wandering around near the rally's base in the Borders town of Duns, vainly trying to locate the actual stages using only the rather ropey map that came with the event programme (and a fair amount of fighting through the overgrowth), I finally caught up with the action at Stage 3. The first few cars through were ex-works WRC beasts in the hands of the visiting Irish Tarmac Championship regulars. And fine viewing they were too. However, a white Ford Focus stood out as being driven seemingly much closer to the limit than anything else. Whoever was behind the wheel, he seemed comfortable using every inch of the road. I glanced down at my programme. Jari Matti-Latvala. A 17 year old Finnish kid. A name to watch, I thought to myself. By the I'd trekked over to the other side of Duns to watch SS7, Latvala was gone, crashing out in damp conditions on the previous stage. Still, it struck me that he was a more likely future star than anyone else I had seen that day.

It was at the end of 2006 that he came to my attention again. Gifted a one-off drive with the Stobart Ford team at the season-ending Wales Rally GB, he drove a surprisingly mature, measured rally to fourth place. It was enough to secure him a full-time drive with the team in 2007. Retirements in the first two events of the season did not bode well, but he recovered to finish 5th in Norway, taking his first stage wins along the way. A trickle of 4th place finishes followed, but Latvala also had more than his fair share of accidents. He might not have looked an obvious bet for the future were it not for the fact that, in only his first full season in WRC machinery, he was frequently setting fastest stage times when he was staying on the road.

The last two events of 2007 rather demonstrated Latvala's unpredictable nature. In Ireland, where drivers went off the road left, right and centre on tricky, damp muddy tarmac, Latvala drove a fine rally to take his first podium. A couple of weeks later, on returning to the forests of Wales, he lost several minutes after damaging his fog lights in the murk on Friday, but with a points finish out of the question, dominated the second two days of proceedings, setting 11 fastest stage times on the way to 10th place. It was warning enough that if Latvala could marry some consistency to his prodigious pace, he would be one to watch.

Malcolm Wilson, team boss at Ford, clearly thought along similar lines. With Marcus Gronholm heading off into retirement, he hired Latvala to partner Mikko Hirvonen in the works team for 2008 (maybe he took my advice!). Some might wonder if he ought to have gone for a more experienced driver, and Latvala's scrappy, accident-packed run to 12th in the Monte Carlo rally perhaps appeared to bear this out, but the youngster turned things round in style in Sweden.

In his second outing with the works-team, he led the event from the start, and looked in control throughout. While Sebastien Loeb went off the road early on and thus eliminated what might have been Latvala's strongest opposition, it was nonetheless remarkable that he seemed so comfortably to outpace his more experienced team mate, Mikko Hirvonen. No doubt, Hirvonen was a slow learner, and never really struck me as being truly from the top drawer, but equally, he's had several years of experience with works teams, and has won rallies from the front, most notably in Norway last year.

In winning the Swedish rally last weekend, Latvala became the youngest ever winner of a World Rally, and broke a record which had stood for nearly thirty years. Henri Toivonen's 1980 Lombard RAC Rally win, shortly after his 24th birthday, had been the benchmark for a very long time. Latvala admitted afterwards that he had always wanted to snatch Toivonen's record, but surely not even he expected to do so quite so soon (he had until mid-2009 to do it).

The parallels with Toivonen are almost uncanny. Both are Finns who came to rallying at a very young age. Latvala drove his first WRC event at 18, while Toivonen's first event, the 1975 1000 Lakes Rally, came only days after his 19th birthday. Both were the sons of rally driving fathers. Pauli Toivonen won the 1963 Monte Carlo rally for Citroen (rather controversially, following the spurious disqualification of the works minis) while Jari Latvala Sr drove in the Finnish championship through the 1980s and 1990s, taking the Gp N crown for Mitsubishi in 1995.

Toivonen was regarded by some as potentially one of the all time greats in the sport. Yet in the years between his 1980 win and his tragic death 6 years later at the Tour De Corsica, he would win only two more rallies - both at the wheel of the awesome Lancia Delta S4 in which he died. In part, this was because, until the arrival of the S4, he was never in the right car at the right time. That is not the whole explanation though. For while Toivonen was undoubtedly blindingly fast, he was also very accident-prone. Part of the reason that it took him until 1985 to secure a full time works drive in the WRC was his reputation for crashing.

It's a criticism which could also be levelled with some seriousness at Jari-Matti Latvala. While he made the finish at most events last year, he often ended up artificially far down the order after losing time with various 'offs'. In this respect, the combination of prodigious pace and a tendency to bend machinery is also more than a little reminiscent of another now-deceased rally hero - Colin McRae. I could yet be wrong, but I do sense that in Latvala, the sport at last might have found a new star to stand alongside the greats of the past - and - of course, Sebastien Loeb.

His early success might potentially present Ford's Malcolm Wilson with a rather awkward dilemma - one with which Ron Dennis would be all too familiar. Conventional wisdom would have it that Ford's obvious championship challenger - the man most likely to take the fight to the dominant combination of Citroen and Sebastien Loen - is Mikko Hirvonen. Yet this just might not be the case. If Latvala can beat Hirvonen in a straight fight so early on in his time at the blue oval, who's to say that he isn't actually the man with the raw talent to go toe-to-toe with the Frenchman?

And what if it's even more awkward than that? It's entirely possible that, while Latvala will turn out to be quicker than Hirvonen, he won't be as consistent. There lurks the danger that Latvala will succeed in taking points away from his countryman, but will not rack up the kind of consistent finishes needed to mount a serious tilt at the world title.

Perhaps it's irrelevant. It's at least arguable that Loeb is the overwhelming favourite to such an extent that Ford would be better off not even worrying about the driver's championship and concentrating on doing what they can to retain the manufacturer's title while - at the same time - giving Latvala a chance to gather experience to make a tilt at the 2009 title a serious possibility. Certainly, I'd be disappointed if it took him five years to win another rally as happened with the previous youngest ever world rally winner...

Green shoots of recovery?

In the early 1990s, there was an economic recession in Britain.  The
people, as they are wont to do when things go wrong, blamed the government. Stuck for any more sensible answer, the government of the time chose at first simply to deny that there was a recession at all. When this line became
untenable in the face of overwhelming evidence, they instead began to
tell us that the corner had been turned, and that we were now enjoying the "green shoots of recovery". Spring, one might
say, was a long time coming, and the phrase became something of a
running joke.

It was a strangely comic little episode that came back to me with the
beginning of the 2007 World Rally Championship this weekend. ISC, who
own the rights to the series, have spent a lot of time denying that
there is anything wrong whatsoever with the World Rally Championship.
After a season in which 15 of the 16 wins were shared between just 2
drivers, and only 2 full works teams were involved, that has become a
rather hard line to maintain. So now we are hearing that the worst is
over, and that the 2007 season will be an altogether more close fought
affair.

Well, maybe... There are, however, still only three full manufacturer
teams this year. Citroen are back as a full works team, with their new
C4. In a sense, they were never really away, as there was little doubt
that they were pulling a lot of the strings for Kronos last year, in an
effort to keep Sebastien Loeb from heading off elsewhere in search of a
competitive ride. Ford, and Subaru, of course, are still around.
However, just as last year, each of those three teams has only one
really established star driver. Sebastien Loeb, with his three straight
titles, needs no introduction. The same can be said of former champions,
Marcus Gronholm and Petter Solberg. But their number two
drivers? Of those, only Mikko Hirvonen has ever actually won a round of
the championship - and even then only because Loeb missed Rally
Australia last year, and Gronholm crashed out. Dani Sordo, over at
Citroen, is to my mind ultimately a more promising prospect than
Hirvonen, having won
the Junior WRC two years ago, but has only ever really impressed on
tarmac. Chris Atkinson strikes me as a rather eccentric choice for
Subaru, but the team have stuck with him for another year. He's proved
quick from time to time, but has been crash-prone to an extent that even

a young Colin McRae would have struggled to match.

Having said that, on the evidence of the Monte this year, perhaps the
understudies will be a little closer to their illustrious team mates
this year. I've never been especially enthusiastic about Mikko Hirvonen,

and have heard stories that he only got the drive at Ford because he
came with a truckload of cash, but he seemed nearer to Gronholm's pace
than was the case last year. Dani Sordo appeared to give an
admittedly below-par Loeb a run for his money at the front, although
whether either driver was really being allowed to fight is an open
question. Such was Citroen's margin of superiority in the Ardeche last
weekend, it is hard to know whether we saw anything more than a
demonstration run from the two drivers. In the end, it was Atkinson who
did best of the
trio, beating Petter Solberg fair and square, and mixing it with the
faster Ford of
Hirvonen into the bargain. For once, he didn't fall off the road and
finished a very creditable 4th, equalling his best finish of last year.

All the same, there are an awful lot of young, seemingly talented rally
drivers who might be more obvious candidates for the number 2 drives.
Its a
shame that third cars have become so uncommon over the last couple of
seasons, thanks to changes in the way manufacturer points are scored.
Were they not, surely somebody would be tempted to give Gigi Galli a
drive, for example. Its nice to see Jari-Matti Latvala getting a
full-time ride in the second-string Stobart Ford team, but, having seen
him in
action in the British championship from time to time, I can't help
feeling he's worthy of a full works seat. Jan Kopecky did a good job of
hustling the two year old Skoda Fabia into the points last weekend, and
is perhaps worthy of better equipment. All the same, the most striking
thing about
the Monte Carlo entry list is the number of really promising drivers
absent from it. Such is the lack of full works teams that there was no
place on it, for instance, for Francois Duval, Daniel Carlson and Janne
Tuohino. And that's to say nothing of the guys who have impressed in the
JWRC over the pastcouple of years, like Kris Meeke, Per-Gunnar Anderson,
Guy Wilks and Patrick Sandell. The trouble these drivers have is that,
to a much greater extent than is the case in circuit racing, it takes
time to become competitive at the top level in rally driving. Even the
supernaturally talented - the likes of Sebastien Loeb
and Petter Solberg, took a few seasons to find their feet before
launching a championship bid. Loeb was instantly quick on tarmac, but
took time to find real pace on tarmac. To some extent, the reverse was
true of Petter Solberg, though it is fair to say he took longer to make
an impact anyway. Currently, the big works teams (Citroen aside) seem
happier to run a reasonably experienced journeyman in their number two
seat than to take their chances with a less-than-mature talent.

So is the World Championship in any better state than last year? Well, I

suppose Jari-Matti Latvala's place at Stobart is worth something, and
Sordo will be more of a threat now he has a season's experience to draw
on, but overall, it still looks pretty weak. On one crude measure things
have improved. Last year, under the old SupeRally rules,
Loeb dropped five minutes and still finished second. Add a five minute
penalty to his winning time this year, and he wouldn't even have made
the points.

Overall, though, the lack of strength in depth in the series
is at its worst since the late eighties, after the abolition of Group B,

when Lancia basically had the sport to themselves for a few years. That
time round, it was understandable. Group B had been cancelled suddenly,
and its proposed replacement, Group S, had gone the same way, with the
formula that replaced it - Group A, looking decidedly unexciting by
comparison. It was not surprising that manufacturers were reluctant to
commit to the sport with such uncertainty about the future rules. This
time round, there is no such easy explanation.

The WRC rules have been around for the best part of a decade, there is
no need to go to the trouble of producing 5000 road cars, as used to be
the case, and yet still the manufacturers stay away.  Other than the
anticipated entry of Suzuki into the series later in the year, there is
little sign that any of this is going to change in the immediate future
either.  Green shoots of recovery?  I suspect we could be a long time
waiting for the flowers to bloom.