DAVID EVANS

“Therier’s nose had been put out of joint”

Here’s one for you. It’s midmorning on Friday and the cars are just going into the second stage of the Tour de Corse. News is coming through that all three M-sport Ford Fiesta WRCS have stopped. Identical gearbox failure, apparently. But here’s the tasty bit, the French and British drivers in the British team are suspicious. Somebody mentions sabotage. And the primary suspect? FFSA president Nicolas Deschaux.

Now, before anybody gets too hot under the collar and considers legal action, the above won’t happen. The Fiestas won’t suffer gearbox failures and, of course, Mr Pres had nothing to do with something that didn’t happen.

Except it did. Forty years ago, Bastia was rocked by the early departure of the two works Triumph TR7S of Tony Pond and Jean-luc Therier. Turns out both cars had the drain plugs at the bottom of the gearbox loosened while they sat in parc ferme. They remained just about tight enough to keep the oil in place until the cars were warmed up and into the first test, then it started to drain away and, both of the British machines were parked up with gearbox failure at the end of the second stage.

At the time, BL Motorsport issued a handwritten statement to the media, saying: “When inspected by the service crews, both cars were found to have gearbox drain plugs loose.

“The cars, prepared by individual mechanics at special tuning [the BL Motorsport preparation and service department at Abingdon] had been run some 200 miles prior to the rally, there had been no indication of this oil loss problem.”

Suspicion first fell on the local British Leyland dealer on the island, which had just had its franchise withdrawn by BL France. But then, much later, Therier outlined his theory to French magazine Echappement. Turns out Therier’s nose had been put out of joint after he won the Milles Pistes Rally earlier in 1978; then FFSA president Jean-marie Balestre had opined that victory for Pond (who’d finished second) might have been a better result to further the international appeal of the event.

Therier took exception to that and arrived in Bastia for the Tour de Corse driving a British-built TR7 and competing on a British licence and said – in the preevent press conference – that this would please Balestre as it would increase the chances of a British win. Balestre went ballistic.

And then, when the cars were supposedly securely locked down, somebody managed to get to them. Access is strictly limited to parc ferme, but senior officials are allowed in. Is the president of the national sporting authority a senior official? Absolutely so.

Before I go any further, I have to thank Mcklein’s glorious Group 4 book for this unexpected tale. And what a story. Regardless of what goes on in Bastia this week, it’ll have nothing on what went on four decades ago.

In the end, Balestre would have been fairly chuffed with the result in 1978 – there wasn’t a British driver anywhere near the sharp end of a top 12 populated by 10 Frenchmen and one French lady.