HOW CITROËN HIT AN ALL‑TIME HIGH WITH THE C4
CITROËN TOOK ITS TIME WITH THE C4 WRC, BUT IT WAS worth the wait. The new rules to which the C4 was built were introduced in 2006 but Citroën decided to have a sabbatical from competitive rallying that year. Clearly it didn’t want to rush the C4 WRC’S development.
Not wishing to miss out on a third straight driver’s title, Sébastien Loeb spent 2006 competing with the Belgian Kronos team in a modified Xsara WRC. He duly won the title, despite missing the last four rounds due to a mountain biking accident.
When the C4 eventually arrived at the first round in Monte Carlo in 2007 it was immediately successful. It won its first stage. In fact it won every stage in the first two days of the rally and Loeb and Dani Sordo were on the top two steps of the podium at the end.
Loeb would go on to win eight out of the 16 rounds that year. In 2008 he won 11 of the 15 rounds, making him the first driver ever to win ten or more rallies in a single season. In 2009 he won seven out of 12. In 2010 he won eight out of 13 rounds and Sébastien Ogier won another two.
To save you doing the mental arithmetic, the C4 WRC won 36 of the 56 rallies that it was entered in during that four-year period before it was replaced by the DS3 WRC in 2011. A 64 per cent win rate. And that goes up to 100 per cent if you look at the 13 sealed surface rallies it competed in. At the likes of Monte, Germany, Ireland and Corsica it was unbeatable.
Records tumbled. Kankkunen and Mäkinen were surpassed in 2008 with Loeb becoming the first to win the driver’s championship more than four times. Loeb’s victory in Rallye Deutschland in 2010 was the first time anyone had won a rally eight times. In Bulgaria, C4s occupied the top four places – the first time a car had achieved such a feat in 16 years. During that year Loeb and Elena were on the podium at every rally except Japan, where they were fifth.
It could of course be argued that the competition wasn’t particularly deep as the C4 was mostly only up against the Ford Focus WRC and the fading force of the Subarus. However, the Focus was certainly a good car and I think that it would be difficult to call world champions Marcus Grönholm and Petter Solberg weak opposition. The problem is that Loeb often made it look too easy. He seemed to drive with such economy and precision, not to mention consistency. Amazingly, he retired from only four rallies in the four years he drove the C4.
Sometimes, however, he did have to really extend himself. His first ever Rally Finland win was in 2008 when he became only the fourth nonnordic driver to conquer the 1000 Lakes. ‘I felt I had to drive above myself on that rally,’ he confessed. ‘I didn’t like that so much.’
The C4 really did seem to be Loeb’s car. It was the first one that he helped engineer from scratch, though curiously he has since admitted that he didn’t actually like it much when he first tried it because it wasn’t as mobile and agile as the Xsara. It had a long wheelbase, however, and that made it very stable, which brought its own benefits.
Loeb certainly seemed to be able to make the C4 work in a way that no one else did. When the Frenchman faltered, the team’s number two driver, Dani Sordo, never managed to take a win (something he has done three times since) and the Spaniard never came close to claiming the runner-up spot in the driver’s championship behind his team leader. Ogier was more successful in 2010, winning two rallies, and Petter Solberg was third in the championship the same year in a privately entered C4.
The Citroën C4 WRC is, then, inextricably linked with Loeb and Elena. They won more of their nine titles in this car than any other. The most successful car of the most successful pairing. Not a bad parking spot in the history books.