L OE B SHOWS HIS CLASS WITH A RETURN TOWRC TOP STEP
FULL RALLY SPAIN REPORT
The Citroen mechanic looked up at the screen anxiously. It read 0843, Sebastien Loeb’s due time into the service park. He couldn’t keep still. Moving from foot-to-foot, he went through some stretching exercises, trying to heat fingers chilled by a damp, dank autumnal seven degrees.
Eyes up, 0839hrs. More stretching. Four minutes later, the #10 C3 WRC turned in. Action stations. The king was back.
Last time Sebastien Loeb woke up to a Sunday morning in Salou a 76th World Rally Championship win was waiting. Almost half a minute ahead, his DS3 WRC wouldn’t miss a beat and the podium’s top step was his.
Of course it was. The year was 2012 and nobody but Loeb had been on that top Spanish step since Markko Martin eight years earlier. The Frenchman had cornered the Catalan market for WRC wins. There was no news left in a Loeb win in this part of the world. It was all a bit processional. Dull even.
Not this time. A fortnight short of six years on, Loeb laughed off pre-event suggestions that win number nine could be anywhere near the horizon.
He described such talk as ‘pretentious’ and Loeb doesn’t do pretention; he’s the very antithesis of showy. Instead he talked quietly of the complications of this third and final chapter in the story of his 2018 World Rally Championship with Citroen.
Friday’s gravel would be OK, he’d shown enough speed to lead on the dirt in Mexico earlier this year – and starting 11th on a road swept clean of the loose gravel should, in theory, offer both grip and confidence in the car. But then there was this talk of the rain coming on Saturday.
What was the problem? Loeb monstered many a rally in monsoonlike conditions down the years.
He leaned in, almost as though he didn’t want anybody to hear. “I didn’t test for this,” he said. “I didn’t have any rain in my test. I haven’t driven a Tarmac stage in the wet for six years…”
And then he stalled at a hairpin in a pretty meaningless dash around Barcelona’s Montjuic Park on Thursday. Going to bed 27th overall on Thursday night was not conducive to waking up Sunday morning eight seconds off the lead. It took time. But it happened.
Friday morning wasn’t exactly ideal. The flip side of running on a cleaner road is the need for a harder tyre to deal with the more abrasive surface. The downside to the harder tyre is the lack of adhesion in the wet. A handful of damp patches cost Loeb his confidence. He just couldn’t feel the car beneath him.
“I’m getting too much understeer,” he grumbled, “I can’t drive it like this.”
When some drivers say that, it reads as a direct criticism of the team. Don’t read it like that. Loeb’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking out loud, his mind was with his engineers, investigating a solution.
A slightly more aggressive approach to the set-up and his attack in the stages delivered an improvement and second fastest on the second run at the 24-mile Fatarella-vilalba. That good way to end Friday was enough to move him up to fourth place.
By the end of day one, two rallies had already developed. There was Ott Tanak in a class of his own, for the second rally in succession (and the fifth from the last six), and then there was everybody else.
This time Tanak’s wasn’t the only Toyota being talked about as Jari-matti Latvala further extended his current purple patch. The Finn went quickest through SS3 to take the fight to his team-mate. One stage later and it had all gone wrong.
A brief aside here – we’ll get back to Super Seb the first in a moment. Last year, the University of Rochester completed a survey that revealed a lot of swearing generally indicated a higher level of intelligence. Latvala showed himself to be, by some distance, the harbour’s brightest light when he got to the end of stage four. In fact, momentarily, you could have been forgiven for thinking he’d been replaced by Gordon Ramsay. He didn’t so much drop the f-bomb, he carpet-bombed it. Turns out he’d had a puncture. “F*****g hell!” raged Latvala. “I am so f*****g angry now. I would have won this rally if we hadn’t just had this f*****g puncture.”
Second had become 10th. His chance gone. Or had it?
Friday night and a penitent Latvala admitted he might have spoken too soon.
“If this rain comes, this is a new rally,” he said.
So maybe he could win after all. “Maybe,” he said with a bashful grin, “and sorry about that swearing…”
Loeb departed the service park hoping the rain would stay away and come back another day. The rain arrived. But it was so hard to call. It was on, then off. Drizzling. Raining. Pouring, briefly. Drizzling again. And that’s all in the space of a pre-dawn, 15-minute service. What to do?
Dan Barritt knew. “Low intensity rain all morning…” he said, before adding with a grin: “…but it’ll be pissing down in places.”
Between service and the stages sat the Muntanyes de Prades. Alpine, but not exactly the Alps, this massif is enough to disturb the weather and drain the rain from the clouds.
What was happening on the coast, where the sun was still firmly tucked up and not yet troubling the horizon, mattered not a jot. The news, the intel and, possibly, the win and even the championship lay 50 miles away where road meets stage.
On mornings like these, radios are clamped to ears as service park spies lurk in the shadows trying to fathom what rubber rivals are running. It wasn’t difficult.
Nobody in their right mind would be taking the hard in such chilly, damp conditions, but would anybody roll the dice and run with the wet.
Radios crackled. “Latvala, full wet.” Silence. Requests to repeat echoed about the place. “Latvala. Full. Wet.”
Hiding a compound is no problem for the teams, the tyre code H5 or S6 is hidden with a simple square of black tape. Hiding the FW3 is much less straightforward. It’s a narrower tyre and comes with a radically different tread pattern.
And it only works in – as the name suggests – the full wet; the compound is so soft, any dry patches will immediately generate heat and take the edge off the tyre. All of which fed into the feeling of surprise at the selection.
When Esapekka Lappi and Tanak followed suit, a new precedent had been set. Never had a team headed for the stages with Michelin’s FW3 bolted beneath all three cars (even if Lappi had a couple of softs in the boot).
When Saturday morning’s opener was cancelled due to the high number of spectators, the Japanese team’s rivals talked of its good fortune in now havingashorteneddistanceoverwhich it had to make the softest tyre work.
The feeling couldn’t have been more different at Toyota. Strategy-wise, it had gone all-in and the team’s newest recruit Kris Meeke explained the frustration.
“There was a lot of rain in that first one,” he said, pointing to a missed opportunity to lift lots of time from rivals. “And there’s more rain in the last stage of the loop.”
Make no mistake, Toyota was frontfoot offensive on Saturday morning. And when Tanak and team-mate Latvala went 1-2 on the weekend opener, it was clearly the right choice.
Ironically, it was, quite possibly, the selection of that softest boot that cost Tanak so dearly as he became the Japanese squad’s second high-profile puncture victim in 24 hours. He stopped, changed, and watched his world fall apart for the second time in three weeks. What was worse was the virtual championship standings at that point. Tanak was joint leading the title race with Thierry Neuville, with Sebastien Ogier three points back. That wasn’t the moment to tell him as much.
Latvala took full advantage of his team-mates’ agony to steal second place just behind Dani Sordo at lunchtime. And Latvala was right: a new rally had begun.
One loop later, at the end of Saturday, six drivers were within 16.5s of victory. And Latvala was leading!
After all the rubber-based histrionics of Saturday morning, Michelin’s engineers looked forward to a far quieter Sunday. And so it would be. Five of those six potential winners all poo-pooed the potential for a hard tyre. And who could blame them? It was seven degrees outside, it had rained most of the night and the roads were damp-borderline-sodden. Granted, there wasn’t much more rain forecast, but the soft was the only choice.
The sixth driver? Welcome back to the story Mr Loeb.
It was a good job those mechanics had done their stretching exercises… with softs on the C3 and the boys about to fire the car up to leave service, Loeb changed his mind. Hards. All round.
With just about enough time, the wheels were whipped off and replaced. Cue more radio-based disbelief.
“I was convinced the good choice was the hard,” said Loeb. “With the information I had, I was just sure this tyre could work in the damp – maybe
even better than the soft. We looked back to what I had said when I drove tyre [with the DS3] and I could if I could get some heat in it, it worked. The information we had was there would be no rain. But yesterday, they there would be rain and there was none! I wasn’t completely sure about weather, but I knew myself for the I was worried if I went on the soft, somebody else would take the hard and would lose. So I said, let’s go for it.” And in doing so, Loeb encapsulated everything he brought to this fight counter seat time in a modern-day Car. He brought experience, the ability to read conditions and a willingness to back himself. The fact that Loeb wasn’t in a championship fight made that gamble slightly less complicated, still Ogier was hugely frustrated he watched his former Citroen team-mate and rival go fastest through the first loop of the final morning and into the lead.