COLIN CLARK
“The modern generation of cars are breathtaking to watch”
It’s a very long time since rallying enjoyed such levels of popularity. In Spain last weekend we witnessed some glorious scenes on, off and alongside the stages.
The opening street stage in the centre of Barcelona perhaps should have given us a hint of what to expect in the coming three days. By the time the first car took to the stage you couldn’t move anywhere in the vicinity of the glorious Fountain of Montjuic that provided the backdrop to what must be the most spectacular street stage in rallying.
There’s a bit of a perfect storm raging in the rally world right now and it’s quite evident by the number of spectators who turned up to watch the penultimate round of this year’s championship in Catalunya.
The cars look sensationally desirable. I still spend way too much of my time admiring the beguiling perfect symmetry and crazy excesses of the rear end of the Toyota Yaris. It’s bonkers with a capital B. It’s also brutally quick and breathtaking to watch out on the stages.
The championship is providing more twists and turns than perhaps we’ve seen in the past two decades. Three drivers go to Australia with a chance of claiming this year’s crown.
The nemesis of a many a motorsport series, predictability, has been well and truly banished from the WRC scene. Last year, seven drivers from four different teams won rounds of the championship. And this year, a nine-time former champion makes a return, just for fun, and snatches a fairytale-like win from our brawling title protagonists.
And on top of all that, we have a promoter who is actually promoting! And what a job it is doing. WRC All Live, where you can lock your doors, turn off your phone, banish the wife, kids and cat to the in-laws for the weekend and fully immerse yourself in the whole WRC experience for the entirety of every round is truly game changing. Rally fans can now sit at home and feel as if they are there, at every stage, and every service, witnessing every moment, every drama, every sweat soaked, muscle burning, mentally draining demonstration of raw emotion. My God it’s good. But, and there very sadly always tends to be a ‘but’, there is a danger that lurks menacingly far too close to the surface of all this success. More popularity equals more fans and, as we saw in Spain, more brain dead morons. The scenes that the FIA shared with us from shakedown in Spain were truly shocking. It was scarily reminiscent of the bad old days where fans egged each other on to get closer and closer to the passing cars. There is ultimately only one way that this kind of behaviour will end, and that is in catastrophe.
As I’ve said here many times in the past, Michele Mouton as head of rally safety at the FIA is doing the most unbelievable job. I genuinely believe that she has already saved lives. Many lives. But with the sport’s popularity on the rise, is it perhaps time for a radical spectator safety rethink?
“The information was useless this weekend,” he said. “Every time we got it wrong. Every time!” He signalled the interview was over by getting in his car and shutting the door.
Latvala was doing all he could. He’d started the day with 14 world championship titles right behind him. His platitudes about him having more WRC starts than either of his Sebastien rivals were starting to look a little thin as he shipped time to the Frenchmen. Latvala remained second, but 7.1s behind Loeb and 3.7s up on Ogier. Then Latvala’s event went south when he clipped a barrier and punctured on the penultimate stage. This time there was no swearing. Just a head in hands.
One stage left and it was Loeb versus Ogier. A straight fight, nine miles and 3.6s between them after a sensational scratch from Ogier in SS17.
Ogier beat him in the powerstage, but not by enough. Loeb crossed the line, not knowing if he’d won or not. Breathing hard, he asked his co-driver Daniel Elena if it was enough. They didn’t know. They’d done it by 2.9s.
Time after time we’d seen Loeb win here, but there was never anything like this emotion. Close to tears, the 44-year-old said: “This is an incredible feeling, an incredible win. I can’t believe it. We had a half-spin at the roundabout this morning doing these stupid donuts, I was a little bit stressed after that. I didn’t think we could do this. This is so satisfying.”
Second place and second in the powerstage was enough to move Ogier back into the lead of the championship. A superb charge from Elfyn Evans, allied to a late puncture for Neuville, was enough for him to edge the man who’d topped the table coming into Spain.
Neuville was furious. Crossing the line with the rear-right Michelin in tatters, he couldn’t contain his rage. Raising his hands he bellowed: “Putain!”
If you wanted to counter Thierry’s French curse, you only had to look to the service park’s red corner to see what this result meant to Loeb. Remember when he won his first title in Corsica, 2004? Remember what he did? He turned a somersault. He did the same in Spain on Sunday. Not to be beaten, Elena completed his own forward roll.
Looking on, team principal Pierre Budar shook his head and smiled. He could scarcely believe what he’d seen. “It’s astonishing,” he said. “Wonderful. To see the speed they could make when they have done no practice or when the tyre is not perfect and the set-up not exactly what they want, it’s amazing. There are not many drivers in the world who can do this.”
The popularity of this win extended well beyond Citroen – the prolonged applause greeting the winners’ arrival at the postevent press conference told its own story. It overshadowed the fact that there is only three points between Ogier and Neuville with one rally left to go.
There’s been no end of talk about the need for electrification in the World Rally Championship recently; courtesy of the reds’ big little man and a breathtaking title race, the WRC couldn’t be more electric right now.