WRC: sport of the people
In Sardinia, rally revellers get up close to the action
‘Canadian?” a short, deeply tanned man asks, and nodding, I find a plastic cup pressed into my hand to be filled with homemade wine, vino famiglia. Here, standing by a 1,000-yearold stone fence, with the sweet smell of hay whipped up in the air by helicopters landing in a nearby field and the Mediterranean sun beating down fiercely, the cheerful stranger offers a toast as the first cars come hurtling over the ridge.
“Salute!” he grins: Welcome to Sardinia.
They say that if you want to learn a foreign language, there’s no better way than to immerse yourself fully in it. As a form of motorsport, the World rally Championship certainly seems to have some difficulty translating into North American. This event, the 2013 rally Italia Sardegna, is not shown on television on our side of the pond.
The basics of rallying are outwardly straightforward. each competing manufacturer fields several teams of driv- ers and co-drivers in specially prepared machines that are loosely based on road-going cars. The course is divided into normal roads, where the cars drive at normal speeds, and timed sections where one by one they’re released off the leash to rage along tight, wriggling tracks, throwing spumes of gravel and dirt.
delve deeper and the terminology starts getting a bit dense: super-stage, powerstage, super-special-stage. rallying is at once a sprint down dangerously twisting roads on slippery surfaces, and a chess game of risk management. Not only is it important to get the car to the finish in the shortest possible time, but you still also have to actually get your car to the finish to win.
“¡ Trata de arrancarlo Carlos! ¡Trata de arrancarlo por Dios!” This the desperate cry of co-driver Luis Moya, urging two-time WrC champion Carlos Sainz to start the engine — just try to start it! The pair were just a few hundred meters from the finish of the 1998 rally Great Britain when a catastrophic engine failure cost them the stage, the rally and the World Championship. Luis’ on-air outburst is quite famous — privately, he tells us that a few other choice words were uttered when the cameras were pointed elsewhere.
Both Moya and Sainz are now involved with Volkswagen’s rally program: Carlos in developing the highly successful Polo r racer, Luis in handling the press. As a co-driver, the hawk-eyed Spaniard is anything but laconic.
en route to the first stage of the second day, Luis talks us through the intimacy required between driver and co-driver, making up a series of imaginary pace notes as he sits in the passenger seat. This is a bit like having Number 99 explaining the secrets of playmaking to a bunch of guys who’ve never worn skates.
Where the drivers are concerned, an almost superhuman level of skill is required. The difference between rally and circuit racing is akin to that between snowboarding and speedskating. Both are difficult, but the rally driver spends his time surfing endlessly over gravel, one wheel hooked into the ditch, flinging the car sideways through the corner. Sardina’s loose and sandy road surfaces are perhaps less jagged than other locales, but a high degree of accuracy is called for as they thread between trees and stony outcrops with no margin for error.
And, like snowboarding, a little hang time is called for in a proper rally. Formula 1 cars are all about downforce, but at the aptly named Micky’s Jump, Citroëns, Fiestas and Polo rs launch skyward carrying contrails of dust. It’s the highest leap in the entire WrC, and there’s nothing anywhere that can match the angry wasp of a 1.6-litre turbo charging unseen up the far side of the hill, the crowd shouting their approval as it makes the crest and takes to the air. The second and thirdtier cars aren’t shy about big air either, their less-powerful 2.0L naturally aspirated engines pop-pop-popping and straight-cut transmissions whirring, making a noise like somebody vacuuming up a lit string of firecrackers.
For the last stage of the day, we join a throng of Sardinians who’ve set up camp around an intestinal wriggle in the course. While locals will happily hike for hours up the dry and dusty hills to catch just a few seconds of rally car flashing past, track marshals have created a path bulldozed into a field that allows for a little more viewing time.
Beneath gnarled and spreading cork trees, the smell of a charcoal barbeque grilling local sausage wafts across the milling crowd, some of whom wave the Sardinian flag proudly.
Then the cars come, dancing through the corners, throwing up clouds of dust to intermingle with the charcoal smoke. Nothing separates the champions from their fans but a thin piece of ribbon.
This sort of proximity would be unthinkable in other forms of highly regulated motorsports; here, the general public hangs over the fence mere feet away, perfectly capable of hearing the Ford teammates discussing the frustrations of an error made mid-stage.
The take-away lesson is this: if Formula 1 is the sport of kings, then the WrC is the sport of the people. you can’t help but hope that someday their “World” will include Canada, that I’ll be able to walk up to a gent in a green, white and red T-shirt on the side of the road in some heavily forested part of Quebec and say, “Italian, eh? Well then, have a Labatt’s, guy. Cheers!”