Bolting wanderers

The drivers get the glare of attention, but it’s the mechanics who are key to the operation of any World Rally Championship car. Time to get our hands dirty with the M-sport crew

herever you are in the world, a group of mechanics accompanies every race or rally car. Without them, motorsport simply cannot function. While the drivers are thrust into the spotlight, it’s these hardy spanner-wielding souls, often the first to arrive and the last to leave, who build, maintain and repair the machines that allow drivers to succeed across all disciplines.

When it comes to those who work out of a toolbox for a living, World Rally Championship mechanics are regarded among the elite. Their Formula 1 counterparts are required to perform blink-andyou-miss-it pitstops and sometimes huge rebuilds, but those who work in the WRC are a different breed. These unsung heroes work frighteningly long hours, and are expected to perform against the clock in services, often performing miracles at speed since driver crews must reach time-control checkpoints neither late nor early. For example, a gearbox change is a job that can be completed in just 10 minutes, while a car can be fully serviced in 15.

To better understand how these mechanics operate, M-sport Ford invited Autosport to be thrown into the deep end by joining the team to work on its brand new £750,000 WRC Ford Puma Rally1 at the South Belgian Rally. While this was a smaller national event – part of the Belgian Rally Championship – it was taken just as seriously as a WRC round. The reason for this was that M-sport had dispatched a crew of 12 and one Puma to offer new WRC signing Pierre-louis Loubet a first outing in the hybrid beast, before his first of seven WRC rounds, beginning on Rally Croatia next month.

“It’s really important as this is the event that will help build my confidence for the rest of the season, so the main goal is to reach the event finish, and if we can show a good pace that would be great,” smiles Loubet upon his arrival to the service park.

“Although it’s only a clubman-style rally, we wouldn’t treat it any different,” adds M-sport’s senior technician of 22 years,

Gary Barker. “We are here to do a job and to do it to the same level as if it were a WRC event.”

So, no pressure then for someone whose only previous spanner work has been reserved for Scalextric cars…

Before any work can be carried out on a Rally1 car, mechanics are required to undertake a health and safety course to understand the potential dangers of hybrid-powered vehicles. New for 2022, Rally1 machines are equipped with a 100kw hybrid kit that combines with a 1.6-litre turbocharged internal combustion engine to produce 500bhp in short bursts. Team personnel must keep an eye on a system of coloured lights and cones to determine whether the car is safe to work on. When a green light or cone placed on the roof of the car appears, then you’re good to go. But if a red light appears on the windscreen or side window, then there’s a danger that 750 volts could end up coursing through your body. A sobering thought.

“The human threshold for current is something around 20 to 30 milliamps, and this will output hundreds of milliamps of current

W– it is not to be messed with,” M-sport’s on-site e-safety engineer Michael Le Monnier tells us. “It’s no more dangerous than working on any other car, as long as you know the risks associated with it.” Fully briefed on hybrid safety, and following a 6am breakfast, we arrive at a rural Belgian street that will be turned into a rally service park in a matter of hours. The car is rolled out of the truck while the crew build up base camp, which consists of a large inflatable tent to house the car. Tools, wheels, jacks, wheel stands and an impressive arsenal of spares, from bumpers to washers, are housed in the truck, which mirrors a mobile Halfords store.

Once set up, it’s time to prep the car. Autosport is tasked with a relatively easy first job – fitting the bonnet and boot catches on the Puma. Suffice to say, a first attempt at pop-riveting is perhaps not this writer’s finest hour, requiring one of the professionals to fix my handiwork on one of the bonnet catches.

This schoolboy error offers a first glimpse of the teamwork, camaraderie or “good craic”, as one of the mechanics labels it. Everyone helps each other out. There’s also a healthy level of mickey-taking among the crew, but it’s all said in jest and can be valuable when times are tough. “We keep each other going by taking the mick out of each other,” says Charlie Shuttleworth, who is one of the team’s newest recruits. “You sometimes get tired and get a bit arsey with each other, but it’s all part of it. You get to see the world and wear the fancy overalls, so it’s all worth it.”

“It’s all good craic,” adds gearbox technician Charlie Reynolds.

“If something goes wrong you have to be there and pick up the slack and get the thing sorted.”

As Reynolds has hinted, fatigue is a genuine issue. At some events, the crew is forced to work around the clock, operating on little sleep. Even the team’s breakthrough victory on the Monte Carlo Rally in January with Sebastien Loeb and Isabelle Galmiche was not a walk in the park. “In Monte Carlo, the first service on the first day we obviously had a few issues and problem solving, but it meant we delayed the start of the car’s service for as long as we could before we had to have them checking in to parc ferme,” says Barker. “But that meant the time in bed that evening was an hour and a half before being back up for a long day.

“Before we went to Monte Carlo we turned up with four new cars and we worked over 80 hours the week before to get the cars to the startline. It’s a big achievement as a team, and we don’t have a lot of people, so it was quite special to win.”

“If something goes wrong you have to be there and pick up the slack and get the thing sorted”