Loeb Makes it Six from Six

One week after Jenson Button claimed the F1 title, another World Championship went to the wire down in the forests of Wales last weekend, when Mikko Hirvonen went head to head with Sebastien Loeb for the World Rally Championship. In the end, Hirvonen fell at the final hurdle, dropping out of contention when he damaged the bonnet on his Ford Focus WRC on the penultimate stage, costing him just over a minute. And so Sebastien Loeb extended his record run of consecutive world titles to six.

I had been paying only the scantest of attention to what had been happening in the world of rallying this year - only when the digital TV transmitters were changed and I found myself able to pick up Dave for the first time did I start paying attention again. When I was last taking notice, Sebastien Loeb had won all five of the opening rounds of the World Championship, and I figured that if he could win in the snows of Norway, there wasn't any realistic chance of a challenger emerging over the remainder of the season. Miko Hirvonen had, to be fair, been doing a very good job of keeping Loeb honest in points table terms. In those opening rounds, only in Argentina, when he was put out by an engine failure, was he not on the podium. Nonetheless, if Loeb was winning on tarmac, on gravel, and on snow, there seemed little realistic prospect that Hirvonen would be able to do anything to reel him in during the second half of the season.

It didn't work out that way. Amazingly, Loeb didn't win a rally for nearly six months, and after five straight wins came five straight defeats. It started in Sardinia. In the days when the Rally Italia was an all-tarmac affair, I doubt anyone could have touched Loeb, but as a mixed tarmac-gravel event, Jari-Matti Latvala dominated from the start. Loeb was hampered with punctures and ended up finishing a distant fourth, behind Petter Solberg in a privately entered and rather elderly Citroen Xsara WRC. Then came crashes both in Greece and Poland, a straightforward defeat to Hirvonen in the Finn's home rally, a time penalty which cost him victory in Australia for running unhomologated anti-roll bars, all of which meant that when Loeb reversed put the form book back on its head by winning the Rally Catalunya last month, he was still one point shy of Ford's Hirvonen in the title race.

With six wins to Hirvonen's four, though, Loeb only needed to tie Hirvonen on points in order to retain his crown, and so a potentially thrilling finale was set up. Each had simply to beat the other to win the title. There was no room for team tactics, gamesmanship, or other nonsense of the kind which rather seems to have infected rallying of late. Normally, in a straight fight, it would be a very brave man who bet against Loeb, and I've never seen Hirvonen as being in quite the same class to be honest. But, but... If there was anywhere, Finland aside, where Hirvonen might be able to beat Loeb in a straight fight, it must surely be the sodden, muddy, foggy forests of Wales. Loeb has made no secret of the fact that he's never felt entirely at home on such stages, whereas for Hirvonen they are perhaps the closest thing on the WRC calendar this year to the forest stages of Finland which he dominated in August.

In the end, Loeb led from start to finish, but his winning margin of over a minute was a deceptive. While he went into the final day with a 30 second lead, Loeb found himself under attack from Hirvonen over the final stages, and with two stages to go, the Ford driver had cut his advantage down to 18s. Then, trying perhaps a mite too hard, Hirvonen landed heavily on a jump, damaged his radiator, and lost the best part of a minute on the stage when he had to stop to allow his co-driver to rip the offending piece of bodywork from the car. And so the way was clear for Loeb to go one better than Michael Schumacher and score his sixth consecutive World Title.

Unfortunately for Loeb, I doubt his achievements can be seen as being of quite the same order as those of Schumacher. The sad truth is that the state of rallying in the latter part of the decade has been such that Loeb has faced relatively little in the way of real opposition. Since Subaru first went off the rails and then withdrew from the WRC, Loeb's only competition has come from the Ford team, and usually only from one of its drivers at a time. The lack of more than a handful of works drives means that this year, there have never really been more than three or four contenders for victory (four only if you believe than Dani Sordo would be allowed to beat Loeb, even if he were capable). When one compares the current state of the WRC with the time when the likes of Makinen, McRae, Sainz, Burns, Gronholm and yes, at the very end of this era, a young Loeb, were going for the title it's sad just how far it has fallen.

As a result, there simply aren't the places for promising young junior drivers to be given
seat time in a pukka WRC car. Yes, there is the second-string Stobart Ford team, and the Citroen Junior Squad, but if these were really concerned with bringing on young talent, rather than generating revenue for the works teams, there would surely be places for Kris Meeke, Jan Kopecky and Per-Gunnar Andersson ahead of such as Henning Solberg, Matthew Wilson, Yvgeny Novikov and Conrad Rautenbach (whose money, it seems, may come from a particularly unsavoury source.)

I half wonder if Sebastien Loeb's apparent dip in form in the middle part of this year was indicative of the fact that even he was beginning to get bored by life in the WRC. He told L'Equipe that he was interested in replacing Sebastien Bourdais at Toro Rosso, and had tested a year old Red Bull fairly competitively the previous Winter. In the end, I suspect that it was only his lack of pace in a GP2 test earlier in the month, where he ended up the slowest of all, that put paid to his hopes of driving in the final round at Abu Dhabi this weekend. On this, I think the FIA were right. Loeb might be one of the most talented drivers in the world, but he has relatively little experience of race driving, and still less of single seater racing. As Luca Badoer demonstrated earlier this year, being decently competitive in an F1 car requires rather more than a basic familiarity with the car, and Loeb would almost certainly have succeeded only in embarassing himself. What the FIA should be concentrating on, is ensuring that the World Rally Championship is competitive enough in future than its stars feel no need for such distractions...

Loeb's Half-Century and the state of rallying

Last weekend's Cyprus Rally was a bit of a novelty. It was a mixed-surface event - with the first day taking place on the asphalt of the island's roads, and the second two days switching to gravel. And though it's been described as a a cost-cutting measure, watching the first day of the Cyprus Rally on the telly last weekend, I think the people behind the World Rally Championship have just stumbled upon a great way of improving the spectacle of the sport.

The WRC teams were forced to run the same tyres on the first day's tarmac stages as they would later run on the rest of the event's gravel tests. And the result? The cars were much more wildly sideways, more spectacular than rally cars have been on tarmac for a very long time. Watching Sebastien Loeb, who was, as ever, untouchable on asphalt, throwing his C4 around with abandon, it was like being transported back to the mid-1990s where much more primitive cars in the hands of such as McRae, Kankunnen and Sainz were chucking their Subarus and Toyotas around such places as Corsica and Catalunya, almost constantly sideways.

In recent times, improvements to rally car technology have resulted in the cars having much more grip on tarmac than was the case, say, ten years ago, and wild power-sliding is simpl no longer the fastest way to drive a rally car on tarmac. Except, put them on gravel-spec tyres, and suddenly, it is again. The fundamental truth is that too much traction and grip relative to power dilutes rallying as a spectacle. And today's cars have no more power than the early WRC cars (though they probably have a bit more torque) and a lot more grip. Never mind saving money on mixed surface events, now the cars run on a control Pirelli tyre, why not insist on gravel tyres at all the tarmac rounds of the series?

Because, truth be told, something needs to be done to enliven the spectacle of the World Rally Championship. Last weekend, Sebastien Loeb took the fiftieth win of his career. That's twenty more victories than the next most successful driver in the history of the sport, the recently retired Marcus Gronholm, and is all the more impressive that he only began competing full-time in a WRC machine in 2003 (though he did a few events for Citroen in the 'toe in the water' season in 2002). Truth be told, though, the man has made the sport his own to such an extent that people are simply switching off.

You can't possibly blame Loeb himself for that. He's just a sportsman who's incredibly good at what he does, giving his all. There's no doubt that he's one of the sport's greats - but is he the best of all time? Is he really so much better than Makinen, or Gronholm, Sainz or McRae? Or has he simply faced less competition? Does he look so good because the likes of Hirvonen, Sordo and Latvala simply aren't in the same class as the greats of the past? Or do the rest look mediocre because Loeb is so good?

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. I can't help but feel that Citroen have employed Sordo because they have him down as a man who is good enough to pick up manufacturer points, without being so quick as to take points off of team mate Loeb. And I still see the Ford team as essentially having two number-2 drivers. Hirvonen has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years, but I'm still not entirely convinced by him, and Latvala? I had him down as a diamond in the rough, but after 82 rallies, it's really time that he started finishing on a regular basis.

The trouble is, unless you're in one of the works cars, then barring acts of god, you are not going to win a rally. And when there are just four works seats, and it is not even clear that the best four drivers are in those seats, the result is that the championship is all but a foregone conclusion. Petter Solberg did an impressive job in his old privately entered Citroen Xsara, and even beat Dani Sordo's works C4, but there was never any danger that he would beat Loeb in such a car (though he was closer to the pace than he had been in a works Subaru over the last couple of years, which suggests that the Japanese manufacturer really had lost the plot with its later Imprezas).

Sure, there are the satellite 'junior' teams, but with the honourable exception of Citroen's entry for Sebastien Ogier, these are running drivers with money or connections, rather than the most promising young talent. Nobody is going to persuade me that Conrad Rautenbach, Matthew Wilson or Henning Solberg deserve a place in the WRC more than, say, Per-Gunnar Andersen or Kris Meeke.

The switch to the Super 2000 regulations currently being used by the Intercontinental Rally Challenge looks like it might provide the solution to this problem. The opening round of that championship, in Monte Carlo, was very hotly contested, and even the recent rally in far-flung Brazil had, on balance, more potential winners than last weekend's Cyprus Rally. The key to that series' success appears to be that S2000 rally cars, unlike their more highly developed WRC brethren, are cheap enough to be a serious option for national dealer teams, such as Meeke's Peugeot UK entry, or Freddy Loix and Nicolas Voullioz Peugeot Benelux cars.

The IRC, despite having a much lower public profile, is also attracting more manufacturers than the WRC is capable of doing these days. Peugeot, Fiat/Abarth and Skoda look set to be joined by Proton, whose Satria looked devastatingly quick in the hands of Niall McShea when it made its debut on the Rally Ireland last month. It is widely assumed that Ford and Citroen will join the party when the rules switch is made, and there is even talk of Volkswagen running a diesel-powered Scirocco.

The reason why, as a fan, I'm nonetheless in two minds about the forthcoming switch to S2000 rules is that, if a WRC car on tarmac doesn't exactly thrill any more, then an S2000 car, which its' much lower torque looks decidedly tame. Sebastien Loeb has said that if the sport switches to S2000, he would rather retire than rally cars which he sees as unchallenging and dull to drive.

Thinking about this, in the light of watching the effects of the 'one tyre' rule in Cyprus, a solution struck me. All that is needed to make Super 2000 cars a challenge to drive, and to make them worth watching, is to stipulate that the cars must be rear-wheel drive. Sure, rallying is about car manufacturers advertising their wares, and yes, almost no modern family cars are rear-wheel drive, but to be blunt, show me where you can buy a four wheel drive Citroen C4 or Skoda Fabia? Rally cars are 4 wheel drive because four wheel drive cars are quicker than 2 wheel drive cars, and the rules allow it. With the exception of Subaru, and perhaps Mitsubishi, neither of which are any longer involved in the sport, the manufacturers are not in the sport in order to sell 4WD road cars. Rear wheel drive cars may not be much like what you can get in the showroom either, but at least they would be worth watching. And what's the point of using rallying to promote your cars if nobody is watching?

BUT IRC EVEN LESS SPECTACULAR TO WATCH - SOLUTION 2WD?

The Schumacher of the Stages and the Young Pretenders

Just a couple of weeks after Andy Priaulx matched Michael Schumacher and Tommi Makinen by winning four consecutive FIA sanctioned championships, Sebastien Loeb equaled his feat. The French former gymnast has demonstrated a degree of dominance that has really only ever been matched in the motorsports world by Schumacher himself.

Let's not forget, after all, just how quickly he developed into a world class rally driver. After winning the first ever Junior World Rally Championship at the wheel of a Citroen Saxo in 2001, he came very close to winning his first rally outright at the end of the season in a Citroen Xsara Kit Car, finishing just 11 seconds behind Gilles Panizzi at the San Remo rally. A part-season spent developing the Citroen Xsara WRC brought him victory on the road in his first event in a WRC car at Monte Carlo (he was later penalised for a breach of servicing regulations and bumped back to 3rd), which he followed up with his first actual victory, later in the year at the Rally Germany.

In his first full season, he lost the World Championship to Petter Solberg by just a single point, ane even then only after having to follow team orders to take it steady at the final round - Wales Rally GB, as Citroen wanted to ensure that they at least walked away with the constructor's title. A year later, he dominated the championship, finishing over 20 points ahead of Petter Solberg to score the first of his four titles. Of course, it would be easy to suggest that he has done so by virtue of a large car advantage - and there is some truth in such a claim - certainly Subaru have been off the boil for the last couple of years, and Ford have only really sorted out their Focus this season - but it is worth remembering that in the time he has been driving for Citroen, Loeb has stacked up 36 victories. His team mates, over the same period, have won just three rallies - and those team mates have included no lesser men than Carlos Sainz and Colin McRae. In 2006, after all, he even won the title in an outdated privately entered Citroen Xsara.

All this is a quite remarkable achievement given that even the best world rally drivers usually take several years to learn their craft. Colin McRae was considered something of a youngster when he won his only title back in 1995, but by then he had been competing - if sporadically, in Group A8 machinery for half a decade or more. Marcus Gronholm and Tommi Makinen both spent years in relative obscurity before emerging as serious title contenders. In comparison to circuit racing, it would seem that in rallying, experience plays a much bigger part relative to innate ability. Perhaps no surprise given that, while the circuits the F1 boys visit are increasingly homogenous, there is little linking the challenges of Norway, Monte Carlo, the Acropolis, Catalunya and the Rally GB. Different surfaces, wildly varying weather conditions and fundamentally different stage layouts take time to master - unless, it would seem, you are Sebastien Loeb.

This year, though, he faced the toughest battle he has had since he fought Solberg and Burns for the title back in 2003. Marcus Gronholm finally got his Focus WRC06 working to his liking, and Loeb initially had to deal with iffy reliability on the new Citroen C4. With two rounds to go, Gronholm held a four point lead, but a crash on Rally Ireland put Loeb in the pound seats to win his fourth consecutive title at the final round - which he duly did.

The question, though, is where on earth Loeb's opposition will come from now that 40-something Gronholm has decided to hang up his helmet. It would not seem that that opposition is likely to come from team mate, and fellow graduate of the Citroen junior WRC team, Dani Sordo. Sordo may have done a competent job, and helped rack up constructors points for Citroen, but away from his preferred tarmac, he looked average at best. On snow, he was rather worse than that.

I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by Mikko Hirvonen this year. I had thought the Finn decidedly underwhelming when he first appeared as a works Subaru driver back in 2004, and had seen little to change my mind when he reappeared as a Ford works driver a couple of years ago. I initially put down his Norwegian Rally victory as a one-off, but his increasingly impressive form towards the end of this year suggest that he may at last be maturing into the kind of driver who can lead Ford's assault on the championship next year.

If Malcolm Wilson and the powers that be at Ford can face having two Finns in the works team next year, it appears to me that they could do a lot worse than to hire Jari-Matti Latvala to drive alongside Hirvonen next year. While Hirvonen was impressing everyone by out-pacing the two title contenders at the Rally GB, fewer people noticed that Latvala was going quicker than anyone else - and won all but 2 of Saturday and Sunday's stages. Had he not retired on Friday (he rejoined under the baffling SupeRally rules) with a windscreen that misted so badly he could no longer see where he was going, he would probably have won. Not bad for a guy in his first full season in the WRC, driving a second-string Stobart Focus.

If the thought of two Finns at Ford scares the marketing men too much (though they lived with it this year...) there are a few other options which would be well worth scoping out - drivers who, in any sane world, would have works drives, but are reduced to occasional private entries when they can get the money together. To my mind, the most promising candidate of the lot is Italian Gigi Galli. Thirty five year old Galli may be no youngster, but he impressed mightily on occasion in the odd outings he has had over the last couple of years. In Norway, he was right on the pace of the front runners in a privately entered Citroen until losing time with an off.

If Galli is too much of a gamble, and too old to seem like he's really the future, Ford (or perhaps Subaru) might like to re-investigate their recent past. Francois Duval comes with something of a chequered reputation, having had perhaps more than his fair share of big accidents in his time at Citroen and Ford. Thing is, though, Duval was seriously quick on occasion. And he showed that he still is, when he returned in a private Xsara at the Rally Deutschland this year and set stage times which gave Loeb pause for thought.


Whatever Ford decide to do, it is clear that something needs to be done to bring fresh talent into the WRC. With Gronholm's retirement, Petter Solberg is now the only front-running driver from the pre-Loeb era still competing. The Stobart team has afforded a vital opportunity for Latvala to learn the ropes this year, but the sport needs more opportunities for promising drivers, young or not-so-young to get experience in front-running cars. Large cheques and nepotism have allowed second-raters like Luis Perez-Companc, Matthew Wilson, Manfred Stohl and Henning Solberg to take up drives which more rightly should have gone to people like Guy Wilks, Per-Gunnar Anderson, Patrick Sandell and other emerging young drivers. If the sport, which has been going through something of an extended rough patch, is to survive and prosper, then it is vital that drivers who might have the raw ability to challenge Loeb are given the breaks they need.

Once in a life time?

Regular readers will know that I have always been a little sceptical as to the abilities of Ford's number 2 WRC driver, Mikko Hirvonen. Having been comprehensively annihilated by Petter Solberg at Subaru in 2004, he made little impression at Ford for much of last year, and his continued retention seemed, to put it mildly, odd. Sure, there was a win in Australia, but against a field so depleted that any other result would have been a profound embarassment. Stories that he got the Ford drive by waving a large cheque book at the blue oval seemed all too plausible.

So it was all the more surprising to see him win the inaugural Rally Norway last weekend, not by default, but by taking command from the first stage and plain out-driving his two biggest rivals. Sure, Sebastien Loeb's chances ended in a snowbank, and there may have been team orders in play on the final day of the rally to ensure a Ford 1-2, but remember why Hirvonen was in that position in the first place. Over the first two days, he had been plain faster than Marcus Gronholm, and had put enough pressure on Loeb to force him into a series of uncharacteristic errors, culminating in the trip into a snowbank that cost him any chance of a points finish. Malcolm Wilson may or may not have called the race off between his two charges on the final day, but it was through superior pace that Hirvonen ended up in front when the music stopped.

It was refreshing too, to see a driver so happy at having won a rally. With Subaru remaining far from the pace, we haven't seen Petter Solberg on the top step of the podium in a long while, and Hirvonen's joy at beating two of the sport's all-time greats in a straight fight was a marked contrast to his monosyllabic and furrow-browed team mate. So was this a once-in-a-lifetime performance? A day-of-days to rank alongside, say, Damon Hill at Suzuka in 1994? Hirvonen has on occasion been fast before, and sometimes too, he has been consistent, but he's never merged the two before. Perhaps, but perhaps it is a sign that Hirvonen is finally maturing as a driver - that while not great in the Loeb sense, he's nonetheless a professional who deserves to be taken seriously.

Rallying is not like single seater racing. Only the most exceptional drivers are on the pace straight away. Think how underwhelming Petter Solberg was in his first year at Ford. Or remember that Marcus Gronholm took part in his first world rally championship event in 1986 - and yet he only rose to prominence when he found his way onto the works Peugeot team at an age when many F1 drivers would be winding down towards retirement. Rallying requires experience, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Hirvonen was at his best on a rally which was new to the series, and so put everyone, grizzled veteran and wet-behind-the-ears newcomer, on the same footing. All the same, one wonders what Gigi Galli might manage to achieve if one of the works teams had the foresight to draft him in as a number 2 for a year.

I've been rather negative about the world rally championship on more than one occasion on motorsports ramblings over the past year. Credit where credit is due, though - the Rally Norway looks like the best addition to the series in a long, long while. Rallying thrives on variety, and now that in our globally warmed world, snow on the Monte Carlo is a fading memory, its good to see the Norwegian rally bring the quota of events on the white stuff back up to two. The added bonus is that the Norwegian rally has, if anything, better stages than the Swedish event. The Swedish stages are interesting enough, but often a little too monotonously high-speed. The Norwegian event, on the other hand, mixes Swedish style fast stuff with twisty, snaking forest roads which were more than a little reminiscent of a snow-covered Kielder. And surely, in time, the fearsome 44km Elvirum stage will become every bit as much a legend as Hafren or the Col de Turini.

Another reason to welcome the Rally Norway onto the calendar is that Scandinavian rallies always attract a good entry, With a relative dearth of full-time works teams in the championship, this is more important than ever. The eleven minute gap back to 8th place Jan Kopecky in his Skoda Fabia might suggest otherwise, but this was really one of the most competitive WRC events in a long while.

Daniel Carlsson joined OMV regular Manfred Stohl and Gigi Galli was out playing with his bright yellow Pirelli-shod Citroen, setting a fastest stage time along the way. Despite more than a few lapses, he ended up top Citroen, ahead of both the works cars and both the OMV Xsaras, in 6th. One place ahead of him, and recording his first ever fastest stage time into the bargain, was Stobart Ford driver Jari-Matti Latvala. I first saw Latvala in action on the Jim Clark tarmac rally some four years back, where he caught my attention, looking noticeably more committed than any of the British or Irish regulars. This kid is one to watch.

His team mate, Henning Solberg was talked of, albeit mainly by his brother, as a dark horse for the victory. In the end, he was too inconsistent for that, but he racked up a few fastest stage times on the final day and claimed the 3rd, keeping Petter off the podium on the swansong event for the unloved Subaru Impreza WRC2006. Then there was Toni Gardemeister, who looked to be fastest privateer of all in his 2 year old Mitsubishi Lancer before losing time in a snowbank. Suffice to say that, after farcical events in Turkey and Cyprus, this new rally looks to have legs. And I wouldn't expect an entry list with anything like the same kind of strength in depth in Mexico next month.

However, if the WRC as a championship looks as fragile as ever, it is clear that some of the individual events are going to be very exciting indeed. Oh, and 10 or so years ago, I hitch-hiked round the south coast of Ireland, and I tell you, a rally on those roads is going to be something else again...

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.