SKODA
PLANS AHEAD FOR THE NEW GENERATION
The stores manager nodded, smiled thinly, and moved slowly to the side. For the Skoda Motorsport team, a full-access media visit to its shiny new factory didn’t come easily. Don’t forget this is a team which doesn’t always let its drivers know what they’re doing from one rally to the next.
But there we were, in a wintry Mlada Boleslav, with me asking somebody to step aside so I could get a clearer picture of rack after rack of hubs. Then I wandered into fabrication, the engine room, had a poke around some offices before getting a cup of coffee in a room with a Fabia R5’s wiring loom pinned to it.
Skoda is, understandably, chuffed with a new 16,400-metre square facility that comes complete with 10 build bays – six of which are designated for customers and the other four for the factory cars.
The Fabia R5 brings Skoda full circle in its rallying story. The Czech firm was always known for its ability to clinch class victories with the 130LR and a Norwegian called John Haugland. Since those days of the diminutive rear-drive 130bhp Skoda, the company stepped up to the main World Rally Championship field with the Octavia and then Fabia WRC. After seven years of full- blooded competition, but little to show beyond a single podium and five stage wins, time was called and Skoda moved back to the classes with the Fabia S2000 in 2008, with the R5 following in 2015.
Standing alongside fashionably grey walls, almost to a man, the media had one question for Skoda Motorsport director Michal Hrabanek. What is the precise purpose of the new factory?
Any answer which deviated from: “This is the facility which underpins the development of an allnew Fabia WRC,” wasn’t welcome.
Hrabanek provided an unwelcome answer.
The script on the theme of the World Rally Car hasn’t waivered for the last two years.
“Not at this moment,” he said. “Because now the current programme is R5 through our WRC2 engagement and especially the opportunity to co-operate with Skoda dealers and importers around the world. We have sold 250 Fabia R5s around the world and you can imagine you need proper facilities with the workshop, the stores, everything. It is all important to you when you want to offer a service on the right level. The biggest motivation to build this new building was the customer programme.”
The biggest motivation to build this new building was the customer programme.
He’s telling the truth. Firstly, there’s no chance we would have been wandering about the place if there’d been a development World Rally Car underneath a dust sheet in the room next to the toilets.
And secondly, swish as the new place is, it appeared short of the sort of key ingredients needed for top-drawer World Rally Car development, including an engine dyno and dedicated damper rig. The dyno is in Skoda’s old motorsport building across town and the suspension department was the only place deemed off limits for the media.
Skoda’s head of technical development Christian Strube explains the efficiencies which will come with the new home for Czech motorsport’s most famous brand.
“Skoda is 117 years old, that’s 17 years older than the Czech Republic itself,” said Strube, “and motorsport is part of our DNA, it’s in our blood. Motorsport helps to emotionalise the brand. I can talk about the emotion because, when I was visiting Rally of Spain this year, I set the alarm at 0500hrs and I went, with my children to the stages. There were so many cars parked, people had slept all of the night to find the best place to watch. And when the cars came, the emotion was just incredible – it was pure emotion.
“And, for Skoda, these cars are so close to our serial production cars. The engine, the base engine is the same 1.6-litre turbo engine that we make in Shanghai for our road cars. And, you know, that Sunday in Spain, when we won in WRC2, that was the day Czech Republic celebrated its 100th anniversary – that was a celebration.
“You came to our new building today, this is our building which prepares us for future challenges.”
Future challenges… sounds interesting.
Hrabanek steps in again and highlights the use of the new facility in, for example, development work on electrification. While the FIA is pondering a way forward with World Rally Cars, Hrabanek says alternative energy is probably even further away for customer programmes like his in the sport.
“When we sell cars to private teams, it’s not going to be easy to maintain electric cars,” he said. “This is my personal opinion, but rally sport will not undergo electrification in customer programmes in the next two or three years. It’s so much more complicated than on circuits.”
But, when customers do turn electric, Skoda will be churning silent Fabias out faster than ever thanks to what Strube refers to as an improved workflow. In the old factory, which is still very old , but now being used for another area of Skoda Auto, building rally cars could be a lengthy process. The bits were, literally, all over the place. Not anymore. A new Fabia R5 takes two mechanics 10 days to build. Every day, a pre-agreed, pre-set box of bits is delivered to each of the six customer car bays. So, for example, on day five, the Xtrac transmission is ready and waiting when the pair clock-on at 0830hrs. By day nine, the car is being driven up and down Skoda’s test track in Mlada Boleslav. Interesting fact here: the track’s only just over a mile away, but the cars still have to be trailered – driving a rally car on the public road outside of competition is illegal in the Czech Republic.
Day 10 is all about tightening, torqueing-up and ticking boxes as another car is signed off and sent to Skoda Motorsport’s shiny new delivery area.
A World Rally Car might or might not be part of Skoda’s future, but the investment in this latest facility looks to have future-proofed the Czech firm’s participation in rallying for some years to come. ■