DAVID EVANS H
“Loeb has done plenty of homework”
e’s coming home. Sebastien Loeb is back where he belongs… at the wheel of a factory World Rally Car.
The time has come to set aside the feelings that Citroen has let Craig Breen down and focus on the positive side of the story: a nine-time world champion’s back to chase a seventh consecutive Rally Mexico win. What’s going to happen? Nobody knows. Not you, not me and not even superSeb himself. He might win. He might be a second per mile off the pace. Only time – and the times – will tell.
Much has been said about how much Loeb knows about the route for Rally Mexico and how familiar he is or isn’t with the Guanajuato roads. But what we haven’t talked about so much is the need for experience of other aspects of Mexico. Knowing the roads is one thing, but knowing how to drive them is quite another.
From the outside, the gravel tracks which reach out from the Leon service park look much the same as any others you might find around the world. But there’s one key difference for this event: the altitude. For much of the time the cars will be in stage mode well north of 2000 metres; for us Brits, imagine Snowdon sitting on Ben Nevis and the rally cars competing on top of them both. That’s how high we’re talking.
Year-in, year-out we hear about the effect this has on the engine, with the thinner air slashing power outputs by as much as 20 per cent. So, the drivers have to get used to a slower car: that can’t be that complicated.
Actually, there’s a real art to getting the best out of Mexico. Naturally, the cars are tweaked and tuned to deliver under the stress of high-altitude, but ultimately it comes down to the driver being able to make the difference.
The key here is momentum and keeping the car right on the very limit of grip as long as possible. Any speed scrubbed takes longer here than anywhere else to build back up. Equally, less power means the softer tyre will come into play far more than you would ever have thought with ambient temperatures around 30 degrees and the hard-baked running even higher.
With less power comes less wheelspin and less slip means less wear on the tyres. Additionally, depending on how much rain there’s been to wash the loose gravel away, a thick layer of gravel allows the wheels to spin without reaching down to the tyre-burning bedrock.
Loeb knows this. Like he knows how to tune the brake balance and bias to cope with excess heat generated from what can be fairly fierce Mexican sunshine.
Only two drivers (Jari-matti Latvala, 11 and Sebastien Ogier, 9) have started Mexico more times than Loeb’s eight. Yes, it’s been a while since he was last here, but revisiting the data, talking to the likes of the team’s co-ordinator Daniel Grataloup and long-time Citroen engineer Didier Clement will bring so much back to him – and that’s before he starts the recce.
Loeb remains the sharpest of operators and an absolutely world-class driver. Countering that, time waits for no man and six summers have been and gone since he last opened the taps in Otates.
One thing’s for sure: we’ll all be waiting on the first split for Citroen #11.