Turning the Corner?

Assuming you're reading this from somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, you'll probably be as fed up as I am by now of the unexpectedly wintry winter we've been having. The coldest I can recall, though those some of the older faces in my office assure me that it's not yet up with the one they experienced in 1963. Any which way, I've certainly tired of sliding around on ice and pushing my way through slushy streets of late. Looking at the snow covered road outside my flat this morning, though, I was struck by a possible silver lining. If the weather keeps this up, at least there should be no shortage of snow in the north of Sweden when the World Rally Championship kicks off in 3 weeks time.

I was once a great fan of the WRC, and did all I could to catch every round, but in more recent times, I've struggled to work up much enthusiasm for a championship which always seems to boil down to a Finn in a Ford forlornly trying, and failing, to stop the mighty Sebastien Loeb/Citroen juggernaut, with everyone else no more than bit part players. Remember when Makinen, McRae, Gronholm, Burns, Sainz, Panizzi and Solberg were all fighting it out for wins in Mitsubishis, Peugeots, Fords and Subarus? The been a shadow of its former self for much of the last decade, and if I were being pessimistic, I would say that there are striking parallels between the WRC in the second half of the decade and the Champ Car World Series in its dying days. Maybe it's just new decade optimism, but I think there may at last be signs that the world of rallying may not be heading the same way after all.

For one thing, the entry for the first round in Sweden looks quite an appetising prospect. Marcus Gronholm will be making a return in a semi-works Focus, and must surely be at least an outside contender for victory, even if he is a few years older than Michael Schumacher and a couple of years out of full time competition. All the signs are that the Petter Solberg World Rally Team will be back too, with a Citroen C4 WRC which should enable him to pose rather more of a threat to the works teams than he was able to do with a four year old Xsara last year. Even better, if it turns out to be true, is the rumour that he'll be running a two-car squad with Per-Gunnar Andersson in the second car. Andersson has been one of the most inexplicably overlooked drivers of the decade. He won the Junior World Rally Championship twice, generally outpaced Toni Gardemeister in his single season with the hapless Suzuki SX4 WRC, and scored stage wins with an elderly Skoda Fabia in Norway last year. Why Ford and Citroen have persisted with Sordo and Latvala when he is available mystifies me.

To be fair, Latvala, at least, has always had pace, though he has thus far been unable to tame a wild streak which has seen him put his car into the scenery far too often to be a serious title contender. It's just possible, therefore, that 2010 might be the year in which he finally gets his wild streak under control and becomes a real title contender. If Ford let him... The trouble with there being only two teams in contention for the WRC is that there is a strong incentive for each to back one driver at the expense of the other to maximise their chances of claiming the title. At Citroen, that's pretty irrelevant, because Dani Sordo has rarely if ever looked capable of getting on terms with Loeb anyway, except perhaps on tarmac. At Ford, though, Latvala has often looked quicker, if much less consistent, than Hirvonen. And at Citroen this year, it is perhaps possible that Sebastien Ogier, back with the Junior team for a second season, might be able to challenge for victory where Sordo has thus far not been able to.

The appearance of Kimi Raikkonen just might be the acme that the WRC has been looking for in terms of publicity. If the Finn's presence encourages more people to pay attention to the world of rallying, and so makes it easier to attract publicity and sponsors to the series, then perhaps it will prove to be the launch pad for the series' revival. Even if it doesn't, it will be interesting to see how he goes. He was more than decently quick in his run in an s2000 Fiat Punto Abarth on the 1000 Lakes Rally last year, but there wasn't really strength in depth in the S2000 class, so it's hard to know how much that really means. Certainly, it will be interesting to see how the first front-running F1 driver in the modern era ever to switch full-time, at the peak of his career, from Grands Prix to the WRC. Perhaps the most intriguing two way competition, though, will be between Raikkonen and 2-wheel World Champion, Valentino Rossi, who is expected to take part in the Rally Mexico in a Ford. While there is little chance that either man will much trouble Sebastien Loeb, it will nonetheless be interesting to see which of the two of them, both of whom have some previous rally experience, will prove quicker. It's a bit like a tennis match between the World badminton and squash champions. You wouldn't expect either to give Roger Federer any trouble, but it's an intriguing contest.

On the subject of people coming to the WRC from elsewhere, I think the news that US rally star, snow boarder and shoe magnate, Ken Block will be competing with the 'Monster Energy' Rally team is another move which, it is to be hoped, might help to bring the WRC to a wider audience than it has been able to attract for some time. I doubt that he'll be able to threaten the front-runners - the American Rally Championship is not exactly a hotbed of competition, but I'd hope he might at least embarrass some of the pay-drivers who have been running in the Stobart Ford and Citroen Junior teams, should any of them come back again this year.

Of course, there is still the problem that there are only two works teams in the WRC at present - nobody driving anything other than a Ford or a Citroen is going to stand the remotest chance of being competitive. The late-period Subaru Imprezas, the Peugeot 307 Coupe and the Skoda Fabia WRC were not all that competitive when they were first rallied, and a privately entered example nowadays stands little chance of troubling the front-runners, no matter how talented the man at the wheel. There are glimmers of hope on the horizon though. Prodrive, it is widely rumoured, are due to announce a programme involving a WRC version of the Mini, while Volkswagen have been sniffing around the edges of the WRC for some years. That said, in order for any of that to happen, some coherence about the future direction of the sport is really needed. Is it S2000 with turbochargers? 1.6 litre turbocharged cars? A simplified version of the current WRC ruleset? Or something else entirely? If I ruled the world, I'd go with Dave Evan of Autosport's suggestion of rear wheel drive cars with big V6 normally aspirated engines, but I'm not holding my breath.

The other thing that the WRC has done little to address this year is the calendar. Losing the Monte Carlo Rally to enable 'event rotation', so we can have rallies in Turkey and Jordan is just madness. And what's the thinking behind the Rally Bulgaria? If the World Rally Championship is to break new ground, how about another trip to the US? Or what about going to Brazil? Jordan has little in the way of motorsports culture and I challenge you all to name a single Bulgarian rally driver of any note...

On the plus side, though, some recent lunacy has been put right. The confusing, unnecessary and orthographically dubious 'Superally' rules have gone, and the FIA have got rid of maximum stage length rules and allowed the reintroduction of night stages. The S2000 World Rally Cup is running to more sensible rules, with teams allowed to pick and choose their 7 rallies to suit their geographic base (though one must be outside Europe) and the category split away from the Production World Rally Championship. The WRC may not be out of the woods yet, but if BMW-Mini and Volkswagen come in, and Ford and Citroen stay, it just might be beginning to turn the corner at last.

PS - I'll be in Birmingham at the weekend for Alianora's Kart competition and thought I'd take the chance to drop in on the Autosport International show on Saturday afternoon while I'm down there. If anyone fancies meeting up, drop me an email at patrick [at] footle [dot] com.

Kimi's New Challenge

Kimi Raikkonen. It even sounds like a rally driver's name. Or perhaps, more accurately, it merely sounds Finnish. The 30 year old one-time Formula One World Championship has become far and away the most high-profile racing driver to switch to the world of rallying. Yes, many racing drivers have had a go at rallying, and some have even proven very quick, but far fewer have made the switch full-time, in the way that Raikkonen has.

And in recent years, about the only single-seater racer to go rallying in a serious way was Frenchman Stephane Sarrazin. Sarrazin did enter a couple of Grands Prix for Minardi in the late 1990s, but could hardly be considered to be a 'name driver' in the way that Raikkonen is. Sarrazin didn't do too badly, either, at least when he competed on tarmac, picking up a best result of 4th in a works Subaru. He was, on the other hand, rather more adept on tarmac than he ever proved to be on gravel or snow and appears to have returned full-time to circuit racing in recent years with the Peugeot sportscar team.

So if Raikkonen were to really establish himself as a front-runner in the World Rally Championship, would he be the first man to establish a serious career both on the circuits and on the special stages? Well, not exactly. Sebastien Loeb has looked reasonably adept in his intermittent outings in sportscars, but he was hardly the first rally driver to switch to circuit racing. Back in the late 1980s, when long-time Audi man and two time world champion found his employer, Audi, were more interested in racing GTO sportscars in the States that taking on Lancia and Toyota in the comparatively tame Group A category, he switched with them, with considerable success.

You have to go further back to find a driver who scored points in both Formula 1 and the World Rally Championship, back to the late 1960s, when all-rounder Vic Elford won the 1968 Monte Carlo Rally and scoring a career best finish of 4th in what was his first F1 race, the French Grand Prix of that year. He won the Daytona 24 Hours that year and would meet with considerable success in sportscar racing at a time when the World Sportscar Championship was a genuine rival to Formula 1.

Go much further back, though, and the distinction between race and rally driver becomes rather hazier. What exactly were the great Italian road races? Was the Targa Florio a race or a rally? And what of the Mille Miglia, which was won by F1 great, Stirling Moss? A race or a rally? He used pace notes and had a co-driver, so, despite the fact that the vehicle they used, the Mercedes 300SLR, was much closer to an F1 car than anything which you might use on a forest stage, it was perhaps more of a rally than a race. Go back a couple of decades further and the distinction becomes all but irrelevant. Stage rallying hadn't yet been invented, but the evocative black and white photographs of Grands Prix of the 1920s and 30s show that many of the road circuits of the era more more resemblance to special stages than to the antiseptic cleanliness of modern F1 tracks. Indeed, there's probably more gravel on some of those circuits than on the asphalt stages of the Rallye Catalunya. In that sense, if Kimi Raikkonen does make a successful transition from F1 to the WRC, he won't so much be the first driver to do it, as merely the first driver to do it in quite some time.

So what are his chances? When he entered the 1000 Lakes Rally in Finland last year in an S2000 Fiat Punto, he put in a very respectable performance, prior to eventually exiting the event in a crash, but then the S2000 machinery is generally considered not to be as difficult to drive as the more powerful WRC Citroen that Raikkonen will be driving next year. And furthermore, it has to be said that the quality of the opposition in the S2000 class in that event was hard to assess. The only man in identical machinery was Anton Alen, who while competent enough, is hardly a star in the way that his Dad was. So it's not easy to know how much can be read into Kimi's ability to get really quite close to his stage times.

In a Citroen C4 WRC, essentially the same machine that Sebastien Loeb won the world title in this year, there will be no hiding place. He has, however, always struck me as a driver who succeeded primarilt because, even in comparison with other racing drivers, he has almost supernatural car control. He doesn't appear to be a man who needs to think his way to driving quickly - if he did, then given that he was not one for spending endless hours poring over data traces, he would probably never have been as successful as he was in F1. As such, his skills might translate more easily to the rally world than would some other Grand Prix drivers. After all, F1 drivers have varied enormously in their ability to cope with the transition to the special stage. Jim Clark was startlingly quick in a Lotus Cortina rally car, fellow Lotus F1 man Graham Hill, on the other hand, never really looked at home in it.

I hope he succeeds, and I'd love to see him give it a few years to really hone his talents. I can't help but think that the rally world selects its drivers from a far shallower, and muddier, pool of talent. There's no equivalent in the rallying world of the extensive junior formula network through which today's leading F1 drivers emerge. And away from the two full works teams, many of those in the quickest equipment (the Citroen junior cars and the Stobart and Munchis Fords) are there because they can raise cash, or have connections, rather than because they are particularly quick. There's something a little depressing about the fact that Conrad Rautenbach and Matthew Wilson have regular full-time drives, while Guy Wilkes, Jan Kopecky and Per-Gunnar Andersen do not. Having an F1 driver after a new challenge throwing a cat among the pigeons can only be a good thing. And if it brings some publicity to a beleaguered and struggling World Championship, so much the better.

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 Future of Rallying?

The Monte Carlo Rally was won by the reigning champion, a French guy called Sebastien. No surprise there, then. The winner, though, was not Mr Loeb, but Junior World Rally champion, Sebastien Ogier. The World Rally Championship seems peculiarly intent on committing hara-kiri and the latest nail in the coffin has been the series organisers' decision to adopt an events rotation system which this year sees the Monte Carlo Rally, the single most famous rally in the sport, ditched from the championship.

Rather than 'rest' the event for a year, or run it as a non-championship event, the Automobile Club de Monaco turned to the Eurosport-backed Intercontinental Rally Challenge, who probably couldn't believe their luck. For all that the WRC has been in a pretty dire state over the last 3 years or so, with rarely more than 3 potential winners in the field and no serious rival to Sebastien Loeb emerging for the world title (only a serious run of bad fortune for the Frenchman kept Hirvonen in the running as long as he was last year, and for all that Marcus Gronholm sometimes ran Loeb reasonably close on occasion, I never really had the sense that he was going to beat him over a season), the IRC has had a relatively low profile in the first years of its existence. It's a fact perhaps explained by the relative obscurity of the front-running competitors. Reigning champion Nicolas Vouilloz is probably still better known as a ten time downhill mountain bike champion than as a champion rally driver. His major rivals, Giandomenico Basso and Anton Alen are hardly household names either, even among racing fans.

With the Monte, though, the IRC got more publicity in one week than it had had in the whole of its history to date. It even got a four page spread in the Observer sports section, not normally noted for its in-depth coverage of rallying. Eurosport rose to the occasion, putting together what has got to be some of the best TV coverage rallying has ever known (much of which is available to watch on their website). Their live coverage of SS5, St Bonnet Le Froid which wound through nearly 25kms of picturesque, snow-covered Alpine countryside, much of it shown from the in-car camera of Jan Kopecky's Skoda Fabia, gave a real impression of what is actually involved in pushing a rally car to the limit for mile after mile in icy conditions with sheer drops off to the side. It's something which years of North One coverage of the WRC has never really captured and made quite an impact on me.

There was much talk of how the Monte has returned to its roots this year, having been homogenised by the FIA's demands that the event fit its standard WRC event template. This was, to my mind, about half true. The night stages at Col De Turini made a welcome return, and the event was spread over a geographically wider area, but the overall stage mileage was actually even lower than was the case previously and the trend for repeating morning stages in the afternoon remains. In other words, the Monte still retains many of the vices of modern rallying.

Perhaps the greatest novelty for anyone only used to following the WRC in recent years was the lack of certainty about who would be righting it out for victory. Nicolas Vouilloz seemed a good bet, but, thanks to a combination of the lack of competitive drives in the WRC just now, and the fact that, well, it's the Monte meant that he had plenty of opposition. Last year's runner-up Basso was back in an Abarth Grande Punto, and he was joined by Anton Alen and Suzuki WRC refugee Toni Gardemeister, in a privately run Fiat. The new works Skodas turned out to be very quick, and Juho Hanninen led much of the event, while Jan Kopecky ran quickly when he wasn't struggling with new-car gremlins. There were also a brace of good serious runners fighting to knock Vouilloz off his perch as the top Peugeot driver. Former Mitsubishi and Hyundai WRC driver Freddy Loix was entered in a Peugeot-Belgium machine, while Ulsterman Kris Meeke, a former JWRC front-runner whose career has suffered lately for the lack of works drives at the very top level, won stages in his Peugeot-UK backed car. Former Subaru tarmac specialist, former F1 driver Stephane Sarrazin was also very much in the running early on.

In the end, looking at the results, one might conclude that Sebastien Ogier had it easy. He won by nearly two minutes from Loix and Sarrazin, with only five drivers within 10 minutes of his winning time. The reality, though, was that Ogier was lucky that his major opponents hit trouble. Both Meeke and Hanninen had looked like they might challenge for victory before they crashed out, and Kopecky and Sarrazzin might have put up more of a fight had they not had niggling car troubles or got their tyre choices wrong.

So is the IRC the answer for rally fans frustrated with the state of the World Rally Championship and looking for something more interesting to follow? Well, yes and no. The S2000 cars are much cheaper to run than their WRC counterparts, cheap enough to be a viable option for national dealer-teams to run competitively against the works efforts of Skoda and Abarth (indeed, Peugeot, whose 207 is probably the best car in the series at the moment, doesn't actually have a works team in the series right now, providing customer cars to dealer-backed entries, and support through the satellite Kronos team which ran Loeb to the 2006 title in a semi-privately entered Citroen Xsara.

Sadly, though, having followed the Monte, it is striking that the S2000 cars are not nearly as spectacular in motion as the WRC machines. They might have nearly the same horsepower as WRC cars, but it's all at the top end of the rev range, and they have only a small fraction of the torque. They certainly don't explode out of the corners in the way that late-period WRC cars do. One can see why Sebastien Loeb was horrified by the fact that the WRC will itself be reverting to S2000 cars from 2010 (albeit they will be turbocharged, and will thus have more grunt). I can't help thinking that one change which, over the long run, would cost nothing, would be to make the cars rear wheel drive. There's no real reason while rally cars should be four wheel drive. If its allowed by the regulations then, of course, cars will be 4WD but anyone who has ever seen a Mark 2 Escort rally car, or for that matter, one of the original Sierra Cosworths, will know that rear wheel drive machines are much better to watch.

On the events front, the IRC has done rather well. As well as the Monte, the IRC has taken over the Safari Rally, the African classic so foolishly tossed aside by the WRC. The San Remo Rally is on the calendar, as is the old ERC classic, the Ypres Rally in Belgium. Add to that a new Brazilian event based around Curitiba and the Rally Russia, and it is clear that the event really does live up to its 'Intercontinental' tag. And there's nothing on their calendar so monumentally pointless as the Rally Jordan either... The old European Rally Championship is perhaps what the IRC most closely resembles, not least in that it is much more asphalt-based that the WRC, with a 50/50 split between tarmac and gravel. This will doubtless help the Italian and French drivers against the Finns, though I've always felt rallying really ought to involve mud and trees. One rally that certainly will involve mud, and probably an awful lot of rain, is the Rally Scotland, which will round off the championship in November. I know I'm biased, living in Edinburgh myself, but I still think that Scotland has stages which are more than a match for anything that Wales can give us, and this is one event that I fully intend to see.

The WRC kicks off this weekend in Ireland, and while the Rally Ireland features some great roads, it hardly ranks alongside the Monte Carlo in the popular consciousness. The cars will be much more spectacular than the S2000 machines in the IRC, but I seriously doubt anyone other than Loeb and, perhaps, Hirvonen stand any chance of winning in the WRC on tarmac unless something really unexpected happens. When I first heard that the WRC was moving over to S2000 cars from 2010 I was disappointed, but on the strength of last weekend, it might just be exactly what the sport needs.

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...

Remembering Colin

Colin McRae first made an impression on me back in 1990, on the supposedly 'Mickey Mouse' Chatsworth House stage at the RAC rally. To my knowledge, it was the first time that Colin had gotten hold of a pukka Group A car, and certainly the first time he had rallied one on a round of the World Rally Championship.

Yet his utter confidence was immediately apparent. He had the big Sierra Cosworth 4x4 more sideways, closer to the edge, than any of his rivals. Even at this early stage of the rally, the rear of the car was already looking rather battered, victim of the young McRae's over-exuberance, but nonetheless, his performance that day stood out. It seemed almost foolhardy. After all, his vastly more experienced father, Jimmy, had crashed out on Stage 3. He kept it up, too, and his battered RED-run Sierra finished up 6th, the best British finisher that year, and as it happened, the bes result by a home driver since his father had brought home his Sierra Cosworth in 3rd in an attrition-hit 1987 event.

It is easy to forget just what a poor state British rallying was in when Colin McRae emerged on the scene in the early 1990s. There hadn't been a British winner in a round of the World Rally Championship since Roger Clark won the RAC Rally in a Mark II Escort back in the early 1970s. Every year, there was the forlorn hope that one of the British favourites - Jimmy McRae, David Llewellyn, Gwyndaf Evans, Russell Brookes or Malcolm Wilson, might upset the apple cart. The results, though, tell a different story. In 1988, there were no British drivers in the top 10. A year later, only the exclusion of Per Eklund's Lancia promoted Malcolm Wilson into 10th, and in 1991, when McRae fell off the road towards the end of the event, the best British finisher was Louise Aitken-Walker, again only just on the fringe of the top 10.

1993 marked the year in which British rallying's fortunes began to take a turn for the better, and naturally, it was Colin McRae who led the charge. After driving selected events for the Subaru team in 1992, McRae found himself with something much more like a full-time drive with the team. The early season produced merely average results in the ageing, and heavy Subaru Legacy, but New Zealand marked the birth of a new era, in more ways than one. The 1993 New Zealand rally saw both the debut of Subaru's Impreza, perhaps the most successful line of rally cars of all time, and the first win for Colin McRae, who would go on to become Britain's most successful rally driver, at the wheel of the Impreza.

After that, successes came thick and fast, both for McRae, and for British rallying more generally, as Subaru's other protege, Richard Burns, rose to prominence. In 1994, Colin became the first British driver to win the RAC Rally in over 20 years, and a year later, despite a bad start to the season, he took the world title. Amazingly, though Colin McRae would go on to become one of the sport's winningest drivers, the 1995 title would remain his only World Championship win. He would come close on a number of occasions, twice losing the title by 2 points or less, but he would never quite get to the top of the table again. Why? Its an oversimplification, admittedly, but McRae never entirely ridded himself of his early reputation as 'McCrash'. He did get more consistent over the years, but he was always a shade more accident prone than rivals like Makinen, Burns, Sainz or Gronholm.

Perhaps it was the flip-side of his speed. After all, when he wasn't falling off the road, he won an awful lot of rallies, and often in cars, such as the early Ford Focus, which didn't really belong on the winner's rostrum. In a one-off comeback drive at the Rally Australia in 2005, he ran as high as second in the unloved Skoda Fabia WRC before it broke on the final day of the rally.

In competitive terms, we had probably seen the best of McRae. His final full championship season, in the Citroen Xsara, was something of a disappointment. Whether it was that McRae, a monoglot, couldn't communicate effectively with the French engineers, or that he simply didn't get on with the Xsara, or that his wild, spectacular style simply wasn't suited to the latest, most technically advanced generation of WRC cars, which required more precision that was in his nature, I don't know. What I do know is that McRae failed to win a single rally in a car that Sebastien Loeb nearly took to the World Title in his first full season. After that, he split his time between odd WRC appearances, attempts at the Dakar Rally, and even at Le Mans in a GT1 Ferrari. In terms of the record books, then, his death might not have been as important as that of compatriot Burns, who was still at the peak of his ability when he was hit by cancer.

There is more to life than the record books though. It goes without saying that Colin McRae will be sorely missed by his family and his friends. Usually, the harsh truth is the wider world can absorb the death of one man easily enough, no matter how important he might have been. The British rallying world, though, will feel McRae's absence very keenly indeed. It is not just that he was the first British world rally champion, it was the fact that he was a real enthusiast of, and ambassador for, the sport.

At a time when British drivers seem to be struggling to make any impression on the sport, he provided considerable assistance to a man I reckon to be amongst the best of them, Kris Meeke. The computer games which bear his name (and very playable they are too - Colin McRae Rally 2 helped me stay sane through my finals some years back) helped to introduce thousands of mainly young fans to the sport of rallying in a way that brings out much of its fundamental appeal. At a time when so many top racing drivers appear to be in it only for the money, and to consider the actual driving something of a chore, McRae was noteworthy for his willingness to run pretty much anything that took his fancy in local club events up and down the country. Over the years, I can remember him turning up in his own Metro 6R4, in a Mark II Escort and, at one demonstration, in his own home-built buggy. I can't see Fernando Alonso doing a sport in the Thoroughbred GP Series in an old Mclaren...

Six years ago, two British drivers vyed for the World Title in one of the most open and close fought world championship battles I can recall. It is a crying shame that neither man is with us any longer.

End Note - Neil over at Fastest Lap has done a particularly good piece on McRae - The Meaning of Legend which captures exactly why he will be missed.

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.