The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
NAGLE ON THE HIGHS & LOWS OF THE WRC
Even after five WRC rally victories and thirteen podiums, victory in last year’s Rally of the Lakes meant everything to Paul Nagle, writes Damian Stack
IN every other way it was just another rally. The rhythms of the weekend ingrained in him by over twenty years of competitive action. Spilt times, stages, legs, service. In a word: routine. Or at least it would have been, were it anywhere else in the world.
You don’t need a pair of ruby slippers to know there’s no place like home. It means more, and this felt more like a homecoming than most. He hadn’t tackled these stages in anger in over eleven years, and back then he was but a scrappy underdog in an underpowered Renault Clio.
This time around, in April 2019, he was the man to beat. A man of world renown alongside another heavy hitter. That brought its own pressures, although none greater than the pressure he put on himself and on his pilot, Craig Breen. He wanted this win, wanted it as much as any of the classics he’d won across the globe. Perhaps even more. The Rally of the Lakes always had a special resonance for Paul Nagle. It’s the event which did more than any other to make him the competitor that he is. It’s where he fell in love with the sport in the first place. His father Maurice – a co-driver of some repute in his own right – had been heavily involved in the event ever since its foundation in 1979, and it was only natural that young Paul would be drawn into its orbit. Even more so once his father helped organise the Killarney Historic Rally, starting in 1996, an event Paul went on to win in 1998. That was the start of it all really. The touchpaper for a career that brought him unprecedented and unparalleled glory. Still though, even with all that success, the Rally of the Lakes remained an itch he just had to scratch.
A second place in 2003, alongside fellow Killarney man Donie O’Sullivan, was the closest he had got. This, he knew, was his big chance, and this was the big one: the 40th anniversary and – even more importantly – the first one since his father passed the previous year. The sun shone on Paul in more ways than one that weekend. In glorious conditions he and Breen fulfilled their potential, driving in style, despite the pressure, despite the emotion of it all. For the first time ever a Kerry man was on course for the top step of the podium.
“The last stage then was Gortnagane,” Nagle explains.
“That’s obviously where my dad came from. To finish there was a big thing for me and a thing I’ll never forget.”
WHERE it ended up was so different from where it all started. Back in the carefree days of youth the World Championship wasn’t even something Nagle considered a genuine ambition. Motorsport, and co-driving, was a passion for sure. The bug bit him as a teenager and never really let go. It just wasn’t always certain to define him in quite the way that it has.
Speed has a way of getting under your skin, though, especially when you’ve got an aptitude for it. Right from his teenage years, right from the victory in the Historic Rally in 1998, the Aghadoe man had it, rising through the ranks rapidly.
Winning the prestigious British Junior Championship in 2002 alongside Garry Jennings was a seminal moment in his career. Then a couple of seasons as co-pilot to O’Sullivan brought him even more prominence. A first World Rally Championship (WRC) appearance in 2004 – alongside O’Sullivan in Catalunya – really opened his eyes.
“That was my first, big, big taste of motorsport at the highest level. Bar it being a private team, but you learned the stages below in Salou,” he says.
Dream stuff for a young man, rubbing shoulders with real legends and champions of the sport – Marcus Grönholm, Petter Solberg and El Matador himself, Carlos Sainz. The previously untouchable and unthinkable suddenly didn’t seem so far out of reach.
Nagle’s next partnership – with another rising Irish star, Gareth McHale, son of the legendary Austin – kicked things up another notch.
“We won the Irish Forestry championship in 2005 and that put us in the direction of going to the World Championship in 2006,” he explains.
“We went on to do eight rallies in total, six of those in the World Championship. We finished sixth in Mexico, which was our first WRC point, and Gareth was the first Irish person to get a sixth place since Billy Coleman many, many years ago.
“That was a huge experience for me. You need a huge amount of experience [to succeed] and that experience really stood to me. The following year I went with Gareth McHale again, but we’d a huge accident in Sardinia.
“It was a big accident. It put us out for three months. We went down a ravine maybe 300 feet – we were taken to hospital
and all. That was the end of my racing career with the McHales.”
The end of Nagle’s relationship with McHale facilitated the start of his relationship with Kris Meeke, inarguably the key partnership of his career. The two men had become friendly over the years – Meeke was in action too in Spain in 2004 – and made for a natural fit.
Early in their partnership, the Kerry / Tyrone duo made a splash. They led the Circuit of Ireland in 2007 and, after the first day of Rally Ireland that same year, they sat in third place. Even though they later retired from Ireland’s first ever round of the WRC, they had made their point: they were going places.
The bond between the two men quickly grew to be absolute. As, indeed, it needed to be. It’s no exaggeration to say that each man puts his life in the other’s hands out on the stages. “It’s huge,” Nagle explains. “You spend a week at a time at a rally together, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner together. You spend twelve, thirteen hours in the car together. You have to build up the trust with each other, both inside the car and outside.
“The driver must trust what I tell him and I must trust him to do it. It’s a very special bond between a driver and a co-driver, because when you have big, high-speed rallies there can be huge accidents and the risks and the dangers are there.
“That comes over time. It comes naturally if you’ve got a good relationship with the person in the car. Sometimes some drivers and co-drivers just use it as a business relationship, but myself and Kris were very close both inside and outside of the car.
“The same with Craig as well. I’ve a great relationship with him both inside and outside the car, which for me is way better because you can talk about more things than just rallying. Family, whatever else you want to talk about. It’s good to have. It’s very important to have a good relationship with the driver.”
It still took them a little while to get where they wanted to be. The 2008 season was a touch underwhelming as the recession gripped. Behind the scenes, however, Meeke was working hard to secure a deal with Peugeot UK to contest the Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC) – now known as the European Championship – the following year.
“That would have been my first big factory team. There was manufacturer support,” he says.
“There were eight rounds all over the world, starting in Monte Carlo and down to Brazil, Italy, France, Spain. They were all over the place.”
Wins in the Azores and in Brazil were the foundation for a championship challenge that year, but victories in two classic rallies – Ypres in Belgium and San Remo in Italy – showed the pairing’s true potential and cemented their burgeoning reputation.
“To win in Ypres and San Remo, the two biggest rallies in Europe at that stage outside the World Championship, to have won the both of them on our first attempt was a massive feat,” Nagle explains.
Another albeit less successful season in the IRC set the Tyrone/ Kerry duo up for their first works WRC deal with Mini BMW. Their entry was being run by Dave Richard and Prodive, which famously ran the Impreza for legendary WRC champions Colin McRae and Richard Burns.
“That was the big one,” Nagle explains.
“Once we got that over the line in the autumn to drive for Mini for three years that was a dream come through. Everything from 1998 to 2011 was worth it to get to the World Championship.
“Unfortunately the first year was a very restricted year and between the jigs and the reels the money ran dry between Prodrive and Mini. That whole thing collapsed. We got a fourth alright in the Rally GB, but it was a difficult year.
“The bubble burst really and we were left high and dry. At the start of 2012 we thought that was it. In any formula it can happen. It was taken away from us overnight, budget, politics, whatever you want to call it.”
It was an early lesson in just how difficult and potentially capricious a world it is at the top of the motorsport ladder. Nagle, though, remained in high demand. After Craig Breen’s co-driver Gareth Roberts died at a rally in Sicily, Nagle was the one to whom the Waterford man turned.
“He had to go back,” Nagle explains.
“He was leading the Junior World Championship and I was drafted in to go to Finland. There was a lot of pressure on me as well under the circumstances. Unfortunately we’d a crash, but we went on to do the final three rounds of the World Championship. We won all three of them in the junior category and he became Junior World Champion that year, which was a great under the circumstances.”
Then in 2013 the Volkswagen WRC team turned to Nagle when Andreas Mikkelsen’s co-driver was out injured. That was a huge endorsement of Nagle’s talent – “it showed I was doing something right,” he says.
Interestingly Mikkelsen and Nagle’s race-engineer at the Rallye Deutschland – their first event together – was a fellow Kerry man, Richard Browne from Firies. Sometimes it really is a small world.
Nagle and Meeke were back together from 2014 as part of a works hook up with Citroen. Over four years with the Paris-based outfit they were to experience incredible highs, but also some quite crushing lows.
“The first three years in Citroen were incredible,” Nagle says.
“We started in Monte Carlo in 2014 and got ourselves a podium. My first podium in the
WRC was January of that year. To have a podium in my first day out was special. Halfway through the year they gave us a contract for ‘15, which took at lot of pressure off us.
“It was a successful year in 2014 and it was enjoyable. I spent all my life trying to get there and then when you get there you’re established and you had your podiums.”
The following season, the duo had one of their greatest days. Almost exactly five years ago, Meeke and Nagle tasted victory for the first time in the WRC.
“We’d a bad start to 2015,” Nagle continues.
“I don’t know why, but we’d three bad rallies at the start of the year before we went to Argentina. I think the pressure was on us. There was two 50k stages on Friday, and Argentina is a very rough rally. We just got into the groove on Friday morning and come Friday evening we’d nearly a 50-second lead built up.
“The VWs were having problems with the altitude out there and we just kept clean. We’d a good lead on Friday and Saturday. We just maintained it. Our team mate Mads Otsberg was quick and we had a Citroen 1-2 for most of the day.
“Come Sunday morning and you could totally feel the nerves were there in the service park. Luckily there was a bit of a time difference from home, because I knew the whole of the country was watching could we pull off the first WRC victory for Ireland, for Kris and myself.
“The pressure was on there and the famous stage in Argentina, El Condor, it’s used every year. We went out on the Sunday morning with a comfortable lead and we knew that if we were just clever that our first victory was in sight. For sure it was a very special moment to win that rally and to win it in Argentina.”
It was the first of five WRC wins, the most satisfying of which was their success in Finland in 2016.
“Winning Finland would be, in soccer terms, like winning the Champions League or winning the Gold Cup in horse racing,” he says.
“That is the holy grail of motorsport. You don’t go there and win. Before Kris and myself won it only five non-Scandinavians had won it. That’s the way it is, and that weekend was nothing short of special. It was my finest performance and the greatest drive of Kris’ career that weekend.
“It was probably the best weekend for Irish motorsport because Craig Breen was third and you had three Irish people on the podium in Finland. It will never be heard of again at any World Championship rally, but to get two cars on the podium that weekend was something incredible.
“When you beat the Finns in the backyard... it’s near impossible, but we had an absolutely faultless weekend from the very first stage. Whatever happened from then to the current time with Kris and myself and between us and Citroen, it will be the moment that will define our rallying careers realistically.”
It was as good as it got for the Killarney man and his Tyrone pilot, however. With the introduction of a new set of regulations for the 2017 campaign, Citroen and the Irish pair were installed as favourites for the World Championship. Behind the scenes, they both knew that wasn’t really on the cards.
“We really struggled in 2017 with the car,” he says.
“Obviously we won in Mexico after going into the carpark! Kris’ speed was phenomenal. On his day, like in Finland, nobody could get near him, but there was flaws. He used to make mistakes. He had a lot of crashes.
“The car was a difficult car to drive. From the first stage nobody was really able to contain it. After Mexico we led Corsica and we retired from leading with engine failure and that’s where it really started to go bad after that.
“We had a huge accident in Argentina after winning the year before. We went on to Portugal and had another
big accident.
The pressure was being put on Citroen. The pressure was put on to try and get results for this car. We were dropped for the Poland Rally and after that then it was a slippery slope really.
“We went to Finland and the previous year we were untouchable, but we finished I think seventh and it was a real struggle. I never enjoyed one bit of it. We went on to win Rally Spain, but that was only a plaster covering the damage being done behind the scenes.
“You don’t realise the pressure you were under until it was all over. The demands of a manufacturer, but that’s part and parcel of the job. They’re spending anything between €40 to €50 to €70 million a year. They’re developing the cars, you’ve got eighty people going to the rallies. It’s expensive.
“You have to be brand-aware. You’re brand ambassadors. When the results was good it was phenomenal, but when the results were bad, like any sport if a striker is not scoring goals and he gets dropped, we were making mistakes, having crashes. It was rollercoaster all the way through with Citroen. Would you change anything? Probably not.”
WHEN the axe fell on his Citroen career, midway through the 2018 season, Nagle was more relieved than anything else. The pressure had become oppressive. The chance to get back to a normal life was welcome.
The bond between himself and his pilot remained strong, however. Meeke came to the Kingdom for Nagle’s 40th birthday, and they remain on good terms. Still, though, it didn’t come as a huge surprise when their partnership drew to a close.
“I’d been chatting to him a few times and there was no desire to go back rallying,” he says.
“I didn’t really have much hunger in myself to go back. I wasn’t enjoying it and if you’re not enjoying it and you’ve been pushed out the door and
you’re away from home so many days of the year it’s difficult.
“Kris was getting the opportunity to go to Toyota and he picked up the phone one day and said he’s got this opportunity at Toyota and he was thinking of changing things up in the car. I totally agreed with him. He told me who he was thinking of taking and I said ‘it’s the right thing to do.’
“He knew himself that I hadn’t the head for it – I wasn’t ready to go back in. I put my heart and soul and life into it for three years with Citroen and it turned so sour. So he took a different path.
“Everything happens for a reason. My dad got very sick then and it was the right decision. My dad died in September and it was a big shock to us in the family and I was in no headspace for it. I spoke to Kathy [his wife] a few times and said maybe now is the time to hang up the boots and hang up the helmet.
“I’d enough done and enough achieved and with Kris going down the Toyota route... I was disappointed, but I knew it was the right thing to do and Kris did the right thing and to this day I still have a fantastic relationship with him.”
For a time that seemed to be that for the Aghadoe man and he was fairly satisfied to leave it there. That was until Breen came calling. The pair had been team mates at Citroen and, obviously, had a bond going back to 2012. Breen too was at a loose end having lost his drive with Citroen when they pulled out of the sport.
Breen asked if Nagle wanted to do the Galway Rally, and together they began to dip their toes back into the rallying scene.
“I went with an open mind and haven’t looked back since,” Nagle explains.
With Breen, Nagle is back in the WRC – albeit in a limited programme with Hyundai – and together they had that famous win twelve months ago this weekend. Even with five WRC rally victories and thirteen podiums to his name, it’s still up there amongst his proudest achievements.
After all, home is where the heart is.