testing the c3 wrc
A few weeks After meeting kris meeke At Silverstone, evo caught up with the Citroën star again, this time with the Dispatch van swapped for the 2017 C3 WRC.
No driver in a regular seat for 2017 has more experience of the new breed of WRC car than Meeke, his parttime campaign in 2016 keeping him match-fit while he developed Citroën’s all-new WRC contender. And whereas Hyundai and M Sport/ford have split their testing pretty evenly between their drivers, Meeke has racked up at least 75 per cent of the C3’s running. This is his car.
We were granted access to the team at the very first test of the C3 in southern France, and then again at subsequent runs on asphalt and in the soaking wet forests of Wales. So what did we learn? There’s no doubt that the C3 looks faster than the World Rally cars we’re used to watching – that it hangs on more effectively through corners, deals more comfortably with bumps and has much-improved throttle response. But it remains a tricky beast to set up effectively.
‘Having the centre differential has opened a whole new bag of tricks,’ says Meeke. ‘Citroën Racing had some experience from before, with the Xsara and C4, but it’s still been a steep learning curve. We did a gravel test in Spain and thought we’d nailed the settings, but when we put them back into the system for the first run on dry Welsh gravel it was incredibly hard to drive. Getting the right balance on those parameters will be crucial.’
The C3 represents a major rethink from Citroën Racing on suspension – a move from the DS3’S fairly firm settings, inherited from the C4 WRC (and, whisper it, the Xsara before that), to a setup that offers scope for huge travel at each corner. Modern WRC events almost always use each special stage twice, and Meeke and his French engineers have known for some time that they’ve been losing out on repeat runs, particularly to the VW Polos, whose Sachstuned suspension had an extraordinary ability to claw down through the ruts and find traction.
You can see the new approach quite clearly on the C3. It’s so soft that it almost drags its rear bumper along the ground under hard acceleration, yet aggressive turn-ins and big corner cuts no longer slow its momentum; the inside wheels have so much travel that they’re still doing their work, propelling the car forwards.
The final element is aerodynamics – not something you may have considered important for a car that spends so much of its life sideways or in mid-air. ‘If you lose something like the front splitter at one corner, you can get to the next and the ability to turn-in is affected markedly,’ says Meeke. ‘So one of our biggest challenges has been developing parts like that, or the rear diffuser, that are 90 per cent efficient for the whole stage, instead of being 100 per cent brilliant for the first few corners before they get ripped off.’
On gravel, the C3 is fast to the point where even seasoned spectators at Meeke’s Wales test were taking an extra step back into the bushes as it drove by. On asphalt, it demonstrates how the new regs won’t automatically bring greater spectacle: it is quicker, without a doubt, but it achieves this with no greater level of drama.
Citroën did back-to-back tests with the DS3 and C3 on asphalt, and we’re told the time gain along a twisty road was considerable. But this, in turn, reveals one of the frustrations of Meeke’s development year. ‘Our problem, really, is that this has all been done in isolation,’ he says. ‘We know the C3 is good. But is it as good as everything else? It’s impossible to say. Monte Carlo and Sweden aren’t really representative rallies, either, and Mexico and Argentina are odd gravel rounds, so we may not know how we really compare until Portugal in May.’