WORLD RALLY CHAMPIONSHIP REVIEW
MN picks out its top performers of the year
The FIA’S engraver had better be ready for this. After starting his World Rally Championship work with ‘Sebastien’ for the past 15 years, finally he gets to do his work with his eyes open. Instead of Loeb or Ogier, Ott Tanak is the new hero, the new ruler of rallying.
Rarely has a driver been so deserving of a title. And in all honesty, it probably should have come last year. From late April’s Rally Argentina onwards, Tanak found a groove with his Toyota in 2018, and he has been in it ever since.
The speed he showed in South America last year was a step on from what others were achieving with this generation of very fast rally cars.
He hasn’t been able to maintain that shocking pace universally, but when he’s really needed it, and when he’s reached for it, he’s found it again.
Back to South America in 2019, and across to the Andes’ Pacific side, and it was there for all to see in Chile. The Concepcion-based event was one of Tanak’s most impressive rallies ever. Not only did he show that speed, but he matched it with commitment, common sense and sheer bravery.
Those three days of rallying through the Chilean woods showed precisely why Tanak’s time had come.
New rallies level the playing field every time, but Chile was more level than ever. On any new event, the most important aspect of rally week is the recce. Get the notes right early on and you take confidence. From confidence comes commitment, and from commitment comes speed. That’s unless it’s foggy, when anything can happen. When the mist comes down, it’s so easy to get disorientated and misjudge things. A 100metre straight can be 100 metres before one corner, then 80 or 120 the next time. A big-speed six-right this time could be a five or five minus when you’re struggling to see the end of the recce car’s bonnet – unless you’re in that place where everything is working, where the combination of self-confidence and selfbelief focuses the mind, casts aside the minutiae, takes note after consistent note from a driver’s mouth and places it perfectly in his co-driver’s book.
That’s exactly where Tanak and co-driver Martin Jarveoja were in
Chile. The road surface, grip levels, weather, tyre choices, suspension and transmission settings… nothing was simple about the WRC’S first visit to this beautiful country, but Tanak made it look like he’d been born, brought up and taught to drive on the roads that flashed up and down the valleys above the Biobio river.
Whatever was thrown in his path, he dealt with it, and when he crossed the finish line of the powerstage – fastest, naturally – he permitted himself a small fist-pump. Ordinarily, he doesn’t go in for that sort of thing. Before the stage starts he’ll wiggle his wrists around, but thumping himself on the legs or slapping his chest to get the blood up? Nah, that’s not really him. He just brakes a bit later than everybody else.
Not only did that event highlight how complete Tanak is as a driver, but it also played him very much back into the championship fight. An electrical issue on the other side of the mountains 10 days earlier in Argentina had left him 28 points behind championship leader Thierry Neuville. His perfect 30 in Chile (allied to an unfortunate and enormous, rally-ending shunt for Neuville’s Hyundai) meant Tanak flew back to Europe just 10 off new leader Sebastien Ogier.
Victory in Portugal three weeks on meant he narrowed the gap to two points off Ogier, and a less-disastrous weekend than his rivals meant he moved into the lead on a particularly baking week on the Italian island of Sardinia. First into the powerstage, Tanak would be fifth when he came out. Power-steering problems almost sent him off the road and nearly derailed his title tilt once more. Those issues weren’t the only ones he suffered through the season. The Toyota was also hit by electrical gremlins with the ECU and the alternator, and then there was the batch of weak wheelrims that arguably cost him a puncture in Monte Carlo and Corsica – he was leading both before stopping to change a wheel.
Adding up, in conservative fashion, what might have been if he’d enjoyed a trouble-free season is a startling task. Giving him second place instead of third on the Monte, second rather than sixth in Corsica, wins in Argentina and Sardinia, and eight more points in Turkey is not unreasonable. Totting those up gives him an extra 62 points and would have put him out of sight well before the finish line of Rally Spain at the end of October.
With that in mind, it becomes a little easier to understand why he parted ways with Toyota at the end of the season.
Few who saw the thunderous look across Tanak’s face as he came into the service park in Sardinia would question the strength of feeling about the 20 points he’d dropped an hour earlier on the road to the sea. Worse still, that was the precursor to the WRC’S summer break. From the middle of June until early August’s Rally Finland, Tanak would be stewing on squandered opportunity.
It was in the radio silence that followed that Andrea Adamo spotted a window of opportunity. The Hyundai Motorsport director got in there and orchestrated the greatest heist since Charlie Croker left Turin with a Mini-load of gold. But regardless of what’s coming in 2020, this year Tanak was the worthiest of champions, something the outgoing champ was quick to recognise.
Ogier and Tanak are good buddies and, sore as the Frenchman was at missing out on going seven up, if he had to defer to anybody, he’d rather it was somebody as deserving as his former team-mate. Not only did he lose to Tanak, but Ogier could only take his Citroen to third in the final standings behind Neuville.
Up the road out of Hafren on the Saturday afternoon of October’s Rally GB, Ogier pulled over to work on tyre pressures and to fiddle with the C3’s suspension ahead of a second dash through Dyfi. Neuville had just elbowed his way past into second place, and
Ogier seemed in a resigned mood.
“I can’t do more,” he offered, looking up from working on the car’s left-rear. “Really, I am on the limit.”
Right then came the realisation that this thing was really over. French rule was finished, and Ogier really wasn’t going to win the championship. A year earlier, Wales had been the place where he’d turned everything around again with another flash of his other-worldly talent. But this time he wound everything up, took a shot and found there was nothing left to give. A month later, he was giving Motorsport News the exclusive on why he’d walked out of Citroen.
Ogier defied significant odds to win three times this season and dug deep to display the sort of fighting spirit the world’s finest sportsmen command to keep himself in a game he knew was slipping away. But with Toyota he’ll be back, recharged and ready for one more season and one more title next year.
Citroen, on the other hand, won’t be. Despite readying a racier-looking C3 for 2020, the Parisians felt they were lost without their team leader and threw in the towel. In doing so, they lessened the WRC manufacturer count by a quarter and slapped Ogier’s teammate Esapekka Lappi firmly in the face. The Finn, like the Versailles workforce, deserved far more.
It’s probably a little harsh to prioritise Ogier above Neuville when the i20 driver finished ahead in the final standings, but the title has, for the past five years, been Ogier’s to lose and how that happened was a significant part of the story. How close was Neuville to winning? Being brutal, not particularly. There’s no denying that Hyundai was a much more potent force under the eye of Adamo, but the Belgian’s undoing was threefold: a dramatic, panelbending no-score in Chile when he was building momentum and chasing a hattrick of wins was followed by a miserable pair of outings in Finland and Germany. The news from Jyvaskyla and Bostalsee was pretty standard fare for Neuville. He lacked confidence and pace on the former, and fell foul of Panzerplatte on the latter. Toppling off a wall in Turkey just about finished the job and seriously tested Adamo’s patience.
For the past three years, Neuville has been the very epicentre of this team and he’s failed to deliver gold. He affected change in the team ahead of this season – Adamo in for Michel Nandan – and benefited from the associated improvements, but still finished second. Next year he’ll have a world champion alongside him morning, noon and night. Failure to establish some sort of authority over Tanak from the off could be the bespectacled one’s undoing.
Following the loss of Rally Australia to rampaging bushfires, Neuville takes some bragging rights as he heads into the winter as winner of the last round of the 2019 series in Spain. And Hyundai certainly has plenty to brag about. The Frankfurt-based team appeared to relish its part as the service park’s pantomime villain, with Adamo dropping Andreas Mikkelsen three times, rotating drivers to manipulate the running-order regulations, and working a Sunday classification to its own end when and where it fancied.
Adamo’s response was simple – and defiant. Break any rules? He didn’t even bend them; he played them.
Adamo masterminded this year’s manufacturers’ title beautifully. He didn’t have the fastest car, but he focused on the man-management of Neuville, Mikkelsen, Dani Sordo and Sebastien Loeb to deliver the South Korean manufacturer’s first WRC title.
Hyundai’s chief title rival Toyota simply didn’t have the consistency to challenge. Too often the Yaris drivers appeared to focus on their own ends instead of tuning into team boss
Tommi Makinen’s bigger picture. Kris Meeke and Jari-matti Latvala both have a devastating turn of speed, but this year was about bringing the car home sixth or higher time after time. Makinen wanted them to become his equivalent of Sordo. That they failed in that resulted in a very different looking Toyota team for next season.
The whole service park will be looking very different next season following Citroen’s departure. The WRC’S response will be fascinating. The cost of these cars prohibits the sort of privateer response we’ve seen in the past; there will be no army of M-sport Fords packing out the space formerly run by the reds.
Talking of the Cumbrian-based team, Ogier’s absence from M-sport was painfully felt. That said, Elfyn Evans stepped up and led the team superbly. He deserved a Corsican win and returned from a back injury for a strong showing at home in Wales. But M-sport Ford didn’t start every round knowing it was chasing victory. There’s a psychological side to that and, while team principal Richard Millener and Malcolm Wilson did all they could to offset it, the edge and application of a six-time champion was missing.
The door to Dovenby Hall is currently being knocked down by a long line of star drivers looking for a ride alongside Teemu Suninen next season. There’s title-tilting potential in that queue, so if Wilson can work his magic with the numbers through 2020, M-sport could top a podium or two sometime soon.
OK, there’s nothing to suggest that there will be any interlopers among the big three – Tanak, Neuville and Ogier – for the title, but the potential subplot of civil wars around the service park can only serve to spice up the current WRC cars’ penultimate season.