COLIN CLARK
REVIEW: WRC SUPPORTS “The grip of the cars took the WRC to a new level”
T his year’s World Rally Championship was the most hyped in history. Of course it was. The comparisons with Group B were everywhere, but the run into 1983 and the sport’s supercar era was nothing like our arrival at the start of 2017.
Every week there was another story in MN, every day another Youtube film and every minute another tweet adding to the excitement of what was about to be the fastest season of rallying ever. Having created these monsters, the FIA began to fret on the eve of Monte Carlo. What if they’d made them too fast? A directive was sent out among the powers-that-be: no more talk of Group B comparisons.
It wasn’t necessarily the power that worried folk, it was the downforce and potential corner speed.
The drivers too were taken by surprise. Sebastien Ogier: “I remember the first stage of the season, it was by night in Monte Carlo. While we hadn’t done a lot of testing with the Fiesta, we had done a lot with the previous [Volkswagen] car and we had experience of testing this generation of car. But I have the feeling we don’t realise the speed because in the test you know the road by heart and it’s kind of easier.
“But then we came to Monte Carlo in the night and after two splits there’s a very fast section. This is the first time I said to Julien [Ingrassia, co-driver], ‘now I understand the speed we have…’”
Hayden Paddon’s accident on that opening event immediately drew the worst kind of comparisons with Group B’s darker side, but that tragedy had nothing to do with the car being driven and everything to do with physics and one particular fan’s decision on where to watch.
The contentious inclusion of chicanes to slow the cars down made it hard to create a global picture of how much quicker the 2017 cars were. You didn’t need a stopwatch. You just needed a place at the side of the road. Preferably a fast road with a bit of a bend in it. Year-on-year, you rarely notice the cars getting quicker. This time it was impossible not to notice. It wasn’t just the speed, it was the stability. In one rip-snortingly quick righthander through Pihlajakoski in Finland, these things looked like overgrown, overboosted Scalextric cars. Not since I stood at Becketts post-1991 facelift have I been left truly slackjawed at what a car can actually achieve.
And the best thing about these cars is the emotion being generated on the inside as well as the outside. Pre-2017, the drivers were masters of their machine and rarely did you see Ogier getting overly excited about what he’d seen from behind the wheel. Not this time. I know Craig Breen’s an emotional sort – and we love him for that – but when did you ever see a rally car reduce a man to the good sort of tears? We did this year.
The good times are back in the World Rally Championship. And they’re back just in time to get even better.