Dirty Weekend
How hard can spannering a WRC car be? We sent a man with no mechanical knowledge to Sweden to find out...
“You look legit! You look like a mechanic!” Perhaps Hayden Paddon" Hyundai’s charismatic Kiwi rally driver" is just trying to be nice! Or perhaps he’s complimenting me in an effort to convince himself that having a spanner spannering on his car is OK! But when bits of me ache that I didn’t even know contained muscle" I feel far from legit partway through my week as a mechanic on Hyundai’s world rally team…
Things start well enough. It’s Rally Sweden" the coldest round of the World Rally Championship! Temperatures in the $%&s aren’t uncommon" and at no point this week will the trusty smartphone weather app show positive figures! But while even Citroen appears to have brought a tent to work on its C's" Hyundai has a building for its i%& Coupes! A building larger than the complex containing my flat" and one which" as soon as the automatic door shuts behind me" is toastier than my home ever feels! Fears of being sprawled cluelessly under a car while my fingers turn blue can be allayed for now!
But it’s not going to be easy! Ernst Kopp is the workshop manager and my mentor for the next few days" the wonderfully patient man (I hope) who will be making sure I don’t bolt a damper in upside down or stick a light pod on backwards! Because" with my embarrassingly absent mechanical skills" those feel like very real possibilities!
“A race mechanic has to be flexible"” he tells me" “they have to do everything! Everyone is trained to do everything * no one specialises like in Formula One!” Hyundai brings a ginormous team of people to rallies * +, are in Sweden * but each of its three WRC cars essentially has four mechanics" one for each corner of the car! And when Ernst says they need to be able to do everything" he means it- while you almost certainly take your own car to different people if it needs its gearbox or windscreen replacing" this lot need to be able to do both in quick succession" without flicking through a Haynes manual or rehearsing the process beforehand!
Once I’ve been given slightly baggy Hyundai overalls to wear * making me feel like a work experience teenager drowning in his dad’s shirt and tie * Ernst throws me straight into the team of mechanics working around Spaniard Dani Sordo’s car! Sensing my inexperience" my first task is to tighten up a couple of screws on the front splitter! It feels one rung above being sent to ask for a long stand!
And yet I’m struggling! The splitter needs manhandling into place" while the screws themselves need to be pushed and twisted simultaneously" a bit like the lid on a bottle of bleach! I must work all of my limbs at once" which is a far bigger ask than it ought to be! Jesus" if I can’t do this…
After several concerned looks from Ernst and Dani’s mechanics" I get the job done" in presumably record time! The wrong kind of record! But this is the sort of tardiness that would be ironed out in training. if you want to spanner for Hyundai" your probation takes place in its test team" the guys who develop the car during the season" but outside of rallies! It allows you to work on mechanicals when time isn’t quite of the essence" but you’ll do timed challenges" much like F/ teams practise pit stops against the clock!
I’m also working on the car in the days before Rally Sweden begins! If this was a ‘service’ during the rally * there are several each day" with strictly scrutineered /0$" '&$ or ,0$minute time limits * I presume I’d have long been marched out of the cosily warm building" without time to get my coat!
Day two begins with the revelation Dani Sordo’s splitter remains attached! It also begins with a gaggle of scrutineers snooping around the Hyundai garage" possessing branded bobble hats and clipboards" but seemingly little in the way of a sense of humour! So I skulk away into one of the Hyundai lorries and help one of Hayden’s mechanics * a chap named Csaba Juhász * make some mudflaps!
Alright" it’s not what most race mechanics aspire to do! But with the proper items having not turned up yet" some replacements need drafting in" so Csaba rolls out a sheet of rubber and with a paper
“I get the job done, in record time. The wrong kind of record”