Keeping it very real
Rally man Jon Armstrong’s aim to turn heads on the stages
Judging Jon Armstrong’s career to date is difficult. On the one hand it’s been a great success as he’s fought and beaten some of the best young drivers in the world. But on the other hand it’s been excruciating, not yet delivering the goods his talent deserves. And that frustrates nobody more than Armstrong himself.
The 2016 season was supposed to be his big break. Battling with fellow Britons Osian Pryce and Gus Greensmith in the Drive DMACK Fiesta Trophy, Armstrong won rounds in Poland and Spain to secure two R5 WRC prize drives the following year. But following the second of those in Spain he’s only started three rallies since, after being forced into a complete year out in 2018.
“It hasn’t been easy,” he says. “Off the back of being really, really high and up on cloud nine racing against everyone in R5 to then the next year having nothing again, that’s one of the bad things about the sport. It’s incredibly difficult to get a drive and almost more difficult to get sponsorship to fund it. Driving an R5 car, if you want to do that in the world championship it’s going to be at least £2-300,000 and that mightn’t be a full year, it could be five events. It just costs so much money.”
Following one-off outings on the Galway International and the Down Rally – that culminated in a maiden outright rally win – last year, Armstrong has looked to resurrect his driving career with a Junior WRC title tilt in 2020. But the opening round in Sweden started with a rather literal bang.
“The whole build up to the event wasn’t good with the uncertainty of if the event was going to run but also personally securing the budget for the event was very stressful,” Armstrong remembers. “I put a lot of my own money into it as well and I think it really does play on your mind when you’re worrying about things other than driving. I hadn’t driven the new Fiesta [R2] on gravel at all or any loose surface and I was spending shakedown and the first couple of stages getting used to it.”
Armstrong cleared those first two stages but it all went wrong on the next. A mistake on recce with the pacenotes led to a “monumental accident” into a telegraph pole and ended Armstrong’s rally on the spot. He hasn’t been afforded the chance to make amends given the calendar chaos caused by Covid-19, and now isn’t sure of the destiny either this year or further beyond.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to happen so I think this year could be a write off,” he admits. “What I struggle with most is getting the budget and figuring out the business side of motorsport. It’s very, very difficult.”
Armstrong’s tale is all too familiar.
He is not the first and sadly won’t be the last driver to have multiple budget-shaped obstacles chucked
in his path. But he refuses to give up.
He adds: “When you don’t necessarily have the budget or the pathway to secure a budget it’s very frustrating and it’s a story that we hear all too often. It’s not just me, there’s loads of great drivers out there that unfortunately don’t get to go the full way because they don’t have the support to do it. But you have to keep trying. I’m hopeful that I’ll still be able to do events in the future.
“It is very hard to let go of the dream. I still am young enough to go into the world championship and try to achieve good things there so maybe if I got a bit older and a bit past it, you sort of have to concede defeat [but] we’ve still got years to go. If you want to be the best at anything, you just have to make it your life so it’s really about how badly you want it.”
There are some that perhaps underestimate how badly Armstrong wants it though. Nowadays, he’s more well-known in some quarters for sim racing than real-life driving. A WRC esports champion in 2018 and now involved in developing the DIRT
Rally 2.0 video game, Armstrong has been a trailblazer in morphing real-life motorsport and sim racing together. While he accepts being a well-known sim racing driver has its perks, he’s eager to not be forgotten about in a real-world context.
“Perhaps whenever I was a real – well I still am – a real driver: see I still talk in that way because I don’t do as much of the real-world stuff. But whenever I was doing the R2 stuff in the European championship, the world championship and then the R5 stuff I wouldn’t have been a big name,” Armstrong says.
“I wouldn’t have had a big following from social media or anything but I definitely was able to put in really good results. I think a lot of people forget about what I’ve done in the past and what I’ve achieved and they see me as this esports guy that just managed to win that and now he’s got a job off the back of it and is getting the odd rally in a rally car. But it’s very much not that way.
“Obviously if I had my way I’d be in the world championship all the time and rallying but I do enjoy the sim racing side of things. I’ve got a good following from that and if you become more popular you’re going to have more eyes on you [but] I definitely do want to show people I’m not this esports guy, I’m not really a joke as such. What I need to do is connect the real world and virtual a bit more and see if we can do more in the real world in the future.”
The task then is clear. Armstrong must keep entertaining his fans and performing well in esports which, in turn, will make him as marketable as possible to potential sponsors and backers. And he knows it. But as any young driver on the cusp of the World Rally Championship can attest, converting that mission into actuality can be a far more physically draining battle than the one out on the stages. ▪