OVERNIGHT DASH SAVES JUNIOR WRC FLEET Last-minuteelectricalglitchnearlyderailsseasonopener

Motorsport News has learned how M-sport’s Polish arm worked through the night to prevent the opening round of the Junior World Rally Championship in Sweden last week from being cancelled.

The Krakow-based firm discovered an electrical glitch on the new Ford Fiesta R2, which is used as standard in the one-make JWRC, after cars had already departed for Rally Sweden.

Junior WRC manager Maciej Woda told MN he feared the worst for the first event of the new season.

“The problem came with a software change in the body control module,” said Woda. “Obviously our cars are based on the road car which comes with so many sensors and actuators that we don’t need, so we strip some of them out. The problem came with our second batch of cars which were manufactured after August last year – which was when the software change came. The first batch, which included the test cars we’d done thousands of kilometres of running with were manufactured in July, so we ran those cars with no problem at all.”

Had it not been rectified, the issue would have affected various electrical components in the cars, including powersteering, lights and windscreen wipers.

“We tried to fix the problem through Thursday [the wek before the rally],” Woda explained, “but in the end, we flew to Ford in Cologne first thing Friday morning and took all the parts with us. We landed back in Krakow at midnight on Friday and went directly to our factory to fit the parts. But still, they didn’t work. That night, I did not sleep.”

Woda heaped praise on Ford Performance in the UK and their colleagues in Cologne for the effort in fixing the problem.

“Honestly, they were fantastic,” he said. “We couldn’t be here without them. Basically, because we were quite tired, we’d made a small mistake in fitting the parts in the early hours of Saturday morning. After talking to Cologne, we realised this – refitted them and we haven’t had a problem since. This was the scariest moment of my career. I kept thinking: ‘How can I have put myself – and the company – in this position when we could not start the rally?’

“In the end, it all worked and we had all 13 cars running on every day of a very difficult rally. That’s an achievement of which I am really, really proud. You know the tight timeframe we were up against anyway, but then when we have this late issue as well, what M-sport Poland has done is fantastic. The success of this opening round of the JWRC comes from us, but it also comes from Ford – we can’t thank them enough for the excellent support and co-operation.”