COLIN CLARK
“Who would have predicted a lock-out?”
Rally Germany turned out to be a bit of a tale of two teams. On the one hand, you have the dominance of Toyota and, on the other, the despair of Citroen. Let’s start with Citroen because in some ways its plight is the most unbelievable part of the tale. It’s quite astonishing really. How can a team that dominated rallying for so long, that practically owned this event and that had such high hopes for the season, find itself in such a bewilderingly difficult situation? Never mind the result being way below par, it actually hit rock bottom when, with two stages remaining, the six-time world champion and its number one driver Sebastien Ogier simply said: “I cannot drive this car”.
That’s just about as damning as it gets.
Now, I suspect that Ogier’s remark was in part borne out of the frustration of seeing his championship hopes rapidly disappearing in the dust of Ott Tanak’s blisteringly quick Toyota. But there’s more to it than that.
The Citroen C3 WRC is far from a lost cause. We know it has rally-winning capabilities. Ogier has, after all, taken it to the top step of the podium twice already this season. We only have to go back a few weeks to Rally Finland and Esapekka Lappi’s fine performance to show that the car most certainly has pace.
What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that the optimum operating window of the C3 is way too narrow to give Ogier much optimism in regards to this year’s championship. If conditions are perfectly suited to the car, it wins stages. If not, it appears it’s undriveable. Ogier, himself, identified this issue as early as the pre-monte Carlo testing way back in December and the engineers at Citroen have been working on fixes ever since.
But these new generation World Rally Cars are not so easy to tinker with. It would appear that with every fix comes further knock-on issues and broadening that sweet spot of optimum performance. For the time being, anyway, it is very much eluding the Citroen engineers.
Compare the mood in the Citroen camp with that of the Toyota camp. You show me anyone who says they predicted a Toyota lock-out of the podium in Germany and I’ll show you a liar. Yes, everyone knew that Tanak had a chance to take the win but after the disappointment of Finland it was almost impossible to think that Jari-matti Latvala and Kris Meeke would feature here. Well they did, and they featured with some degree of style and class.
Toyota boss Tommi Makinen very publically chastised his two sometimes errant drivers in Finland but, my goodness, did they pay him back here in Germany.
And to cap a remarkable weekend for Toyota, rookie Japanese driver Takamoto Katsuta steered his mighty Yaris into the top 10 on his WRC debut.
It’s hard to believe that the team that’s been around for less than three seasons is threatening a period of Japanese domination of rallying not seen for decades. In Makinen and the Yaris, they have two of the three vital components to make domination a reality. A balanced and cohesive driver line-up is the other vital factor and over the remaining four rallies of the year we might well find out if Toyota has that too.