Punchy engine at the heart of the R5
Stephane Lefebvre grinned. He’d started and now he couldn’t stop. Asked to describe the road he’s just driven down, he replied that it looked just like Wales. Then paused. “… Except it’s dry!” Lefebvre’s mood couldn’t have been better in the south-western French woods last week. The lead driver in Citroen’s development programme for the C3 R5 was getting to work.
“I’ve never done this before,” he said, “never done a full development for a rally car. It’s exciting.”
Even more exciting because, after the R5 pigs Peugeot and DS combined to turn out last time, Citroen looks to have come up with something considerably more worthwhile this time around.
“Honestly,” said Lefebvre, “for me, this is a mini World Rally Car.”
We’re talking the 2016 flavour here, by the way.
And you can see where Lefebvre’s coming from: the Reiger suspension has sufficient travel to rival that of a DS 3 WRC and, while the engine has nothing like the outright power of a world car, Citroen Racing has produced something with a significant slab of torque. Does torque come in slabs? Maybe it’s a chunk.
It doesn’t matter. What does matter is the C3 R5’s progress out of slow corners. If it wasn’t for the dust, the ear-to-ear grin behind the wheel would be clearly visible.
“You can buzz it out of those corners in second gear,” he said. “Sometimes, even third. In the old car you would be down to first. This is the first test, I know. But this car is very nice. Very, very nice. It’s easy to drive and it already has the good balance to give you plenty of confidence with the car.”
Asked to compare it to other R5s, Lefebvre looks slightly embarrassed. His only point of reference is the DS 3 R5.
Eventually, he concedes: “This one is so much better, it’s impossible to compare. It’s so much better than I thought it would be and really, so much better than the one before. This is my first time with Reiger and I’m really impressed, everything is nice and really fluid on the suspension, there are no kicks, nothing. And the same with the engine, the torque is so impressive.”
It was hard to argue from the outside. Watching in fast, slow, rough, rocky and jumpy bits of this Welsh lookalike, the car looked stable, smooth, pliable, tractable and quick.
How quick? Who knows?
Lefebvre, Craig Breen and anybody dressed in red reckons it’s racey. They would.
One thing’s for sure, it’s not going to be nearly as easy to dismiss as its predecessor.
Iwas on the Woodpecker Rally. It was raining as I sat waiting for the cars to come out of Radnor. The miserable weather reflected my mood. Even Radio 1 had given up Britpop for Elton John. Princess Diana had died. I must admit, I was far from her biggest fan, but it was almost impossible not to get caught up in the deep sadness which enveloped Britain that Sunday morning. Twenty years on and wall-to-wall replays of every aspect of her life and last moments brought the memory and those feelings flooding back for many last month.
It was the same for me, except my sadness comes a decade and a fortnight or so later. September 15, 2007 was our Diana, our JFK. Like you, I’ll never forget where I was the moment I heard news that was simply incomprehensible. Don’t be silly. He can’t be. It’s Colin. Working on a podcast (available now on our sister website autosport.com) with some of the key figures from Mcrae’s life and career, two things become very clear: his death remains just as incomprehensible today and where have the last 10 years gone?
Actually, as you will have seen from elsewhere on this page, it’s three things: the third being that we will never see the like of Colin again.
One thing I’ve learned with the passing of time is just how fortunate I was to know him. With every year that passes, his star shines brighter, bigger, faster, stronger. And I love that. In another 10 years, Mcrae will have rolled his Subaru Legacy RS 30 not 13 times at the 1992 1,000 Lakes. And he’ll have won. Not finished eighth.
Let’s make a pact never to let the facts get in the way of the legend.
Talking to folk less fortunate – those too young to have seen that head inclined as another gear was snatched or that pause when Colin let you think you really were in trouble, just before his face split and the ribbing began. It brings home what we’ve lost.
Elsewhere on this page you’ll read David Lapworth talking about why we’ll never see another Colin Mcrae-style career. There will be those who might point to Kris Meeke – the very driver Mcrae himself mentored – but a few crashes and a similarly committed approach don’t draw a parallel.
Meeke would have been a world champion by now if somebody had taken him on in the same way that first Ford and then Subaru took Mcrae on and stood by him. If Citroen and Yves Matton think they can trade hours in the body shop, they can think again.
Mcrae arrived at a time when the cars commanded his brand of commitment, but the scruff of the neck has now given way to a finger-tip approach, albeit less-so with these 2017 World Rally Cars. Colin brought happiness to millions. Just by walking into a room he could bring the place to a standstill. I saw people lost for words, genuinely stopped in their tracks when confronted by this trained plumber from Lanark.
Unlikely I know, but Coco and the good Lady D appear to have had more in common than we might have thought. One thing’s more than sure: both are missed by the masses now as much as ever.