TANAK REMAINS ON TOP IN GERMANY
Hyundai looked like it might challenge, but the Yaris man had it covered
Twenty-six years. That’s the last time Toyota scored a 1-2-3 in the World Rally Championship. Swap Juha Kankkunen, Markku Alen and Ian Duncan for Ott Tanak, Kris Meeke and Jari-matti Latvala, and the Safari for a Rally Germany, which felt just as treacherous as Nairobi (also, forget that the 1993 result was actually a 1-2-3-4 with Yasuhiro Iwase in fourth).
It was an event full of threes last weekend. Toyota scored a 1-2-3, Tanak secured his third Rally Germany win in a row – and his fifth WRC success this season. His future also dominated pre-event discussions, with three suitors; Hyundai, M-sport and Toyota all in talks with the star.
All four manufacturers brought
upgrades to Germany in a bid to race through the roads surrounding the
Mosel river faster than the others. M-sport and Hyundai came boosted by work on dampers – even if Hyundai team boss Andrea Adamo gave journalists who asked about its updates a tongue-lashing ahead of the rally – while the biggest changes appeared to come from the Citroen camp with an engine upgrade. Lead driver Sebastien Ogier said: “It’s a little more power. If I’m honest it’s not something I can sense when I drive, [but] I believe it will help us with the time.”
It looked like all the crews would spend the event looking at the back of the Toyota – not a racing term suggesting that they would all be behind but because it brought a new spoiler to Germany. The aerodynamic profile had not changed, just the positioning after the FIA had clarified a rule relating to the bodywork in Finland. The FIA insisted in Finland that Toyota’s wing wasn’t illegal. Toyota brought an updated wing to Germany. We’ll leave that one there.
Upgrades aside, drivers cautioned that this event was going to be won or lost on Saturday’s 25.58-mile Panzerplatte test, not least because drivers were stunned by how messy and dusty it was. Tanak scored the ‘best’ result of four punctures on the pre-event reconnaissance, with Meeke a close second with three.
But that didn’t mean Friday was irrelevant. The narrow and twisty roads through the vineyards above Bostalsee and Trittenheim are a challenge, and the big cuts drivers take threaten to litter the road with debris – or “poison” as Citroen’s Esapekka Lappi referred to it as last year.
Tanak and Hyundai’s star Thierry Neuville were shot out of a cannon. It was clear that we were about to witness an almighty and memorable fight between the duo, the dry conditions removing any question of tyre choice or mud on the road. A straight fight, mano a mano.
The third mano, Ogier, was already sweating. Pushing. Desperate.
Despite his declaration that a win was the only objective, his pre-event test had provided a bucketload of understeer.
It’s difficult to understand how the team responsible for nine wins on this event with Sebastien Loeb alone can’t get to the bottom of its asphalt understeer issues it also suffered in Corsica earlier this year, but the test leading up to the event was blamed.
The problem was, rain had hit on the only full day of pre-event testing Ogier got. So the changes that Citroen thought would cure it’s understeer issues in Corsica went untested properly, and they were not an improvement.”
By first service on Friday Ogier was
13.7 seconds adrift, a lifetime in this event, especially after just four stages. He ended the day 22.1s behind Tanak despite feeling the car improve after changes in service. Fittingly, a trip into a field in SS7 – the last stage of the day – could be blamed for extra time loss, Ogier pushing to the absolute limit. It’s a shame to see the WRC’S best driver with an arm tied behind his back.
Dani Sordo was also hit by trouble. Gearbox issues turned what could have been a shot at the podium – 2.8s off Ogier heading into the final stage on Friday – into a nightmare, dropping the Hyundai back to ninth at the end of the day.
Up front, the pace had been frantic. Tanak started as he meant to go on, winning Thursday night’s opening stage, and led for all but one stage during Friday. But the gap was never more than 3.2s.
Adamo had called for improvements from Hyundai on asphalt to boost Neuville’s chances against the mighty Toyotas. They’d won in Corsica, but Neuville and Hyundai got lucky with other people’s problems. The team clearly answered, with Neuville on the ragged edge and delivering the kind of drive that marks him out as deserving one of the places at the WRC’S top table. But Tanak is in incredible form and after Neuville moved within striking distance (1.6s back after the Friday midday service) Tanak responded and took a 2.8s lead into Saturday. The Panzerplatte (translation: tank plate) was on the horizon.
First, the small matter of four more vineyard-style stages on Saturday morning. Neuville closed in to trail by
1.5s after the first stage of the day. Was there a hole in Tanak’s almighty armour? The only thing capable of beating Tanak this year has been the Rally Gods and poor reliability. Was Neuville about to gift the WRC one of its best drives in recent memory by conquering its Mr Untouchable?
A chicane said no. In the very next stage Neuville overcooked the entry to a leftright, stalled, and then a fuse went and the i20 Coupe wouldn’t restart for what felt like an eternity. Amazingly he trailed by just 6.7s by the end of the stage, and by 5s heading into the two Baumholder Military Base stages. Arena Panzerplatte is a 6.67-mile dash, but Panzerplatte is the biggie. It’s pointless reading too much into the arena test because so many drivers save tyres in a bid to give them better life in the longer run through
‘the big one’.
It’s a tough stage, with broken concrete, broken asphalt, a mixture of dust and gravel on the surface and it is, of course, lined by the infamous hinkelsteins. Used to keep tanks off the road, they are like an iceberg in that, while they protrude no more than a foot or two out of the ground, three to seven feet is under the ground and they are completely immovable. Never mind driving into them, a tank would struggle to move one with a 120mm shell. Ask Petter Solberg after his shunt in 2003.
One of the Panzerplatte’s most distinctive features is its large jump,
Gina, named after the infamous actress, Lollobrigida. Her first major film seen in English was the 1953 epic Beat the Devil, in which the script was written day to day as it was filmed. Much like the 2019 Rally Germany variant: Panzerplatte played the devil, and its script changed continuously through the mammoth test.
With Neuville, Ogier and Tanak running in that order, drama struck immediately on what was the sixth stage of the day and the first run through Panzerplatte. Neuville got a puncture.
He lost just 1m26.8s to the fastest time – set, of course, by Tanak – in what was an incredibly quick tyre change, just 1m12s from car stopped to starting again. But that was little consolation. His hopes of a win were gone. He would eventually come home fourth, as the top non-toyota driver, and now trails Tanak by 33 points in the championship with four rounds to go.
Tanak admitted after the event that
Neuville had been quicker on the Saturday, and even suggested he would have settled for second if Neuville had continued at that pace. But the stars aligned for the Toyota driver and Neuville was out of the fight.
After service and another run through the Arena stage it was time for another go at ‘tank plate’, and this time it was Ogier beaten by the devil. After 1m22s parked on the side of the Panzerplatte road and a Michelin changed, he was back in action, but it was enough to drop him out of the podium battle and way down the order. “I think the whole rally has been disappointing,” he said at the end of the stage, “and we didn’t need this bad luck on top of it.”
You can only imagine Neuville and Ogier spending every waking minute hoping for a (safe) Tanak puncture, but it never came. Not only did the Estonian take a lead of over 40s – almost impossible to claw back on dry asphalt roads – but Ogier’s demotion put Tanak’s Toyota rear gunners Meeke and Latvala in place to complete the podium.
Meeke had driven fantastically all weekend, in a perfect response to his critics after retiring thanks to a small mistake in Finland at the start of the month. A stage win in the second running of Panzerplatte – in a bid to hold off the anticipated charge of Ogier, not knowing he’d stopped with a puncture – was breathtaking. A quietly quick but assured drive was exactly what Toyota needed behind the blistering pace of Tanak and a first podium of the year for Meeke was the reward. Punctures and mistakes have robbed him of the feat so far since his move to the team after a short sabbatical from Citroen last year.
The charge Meeke had anticipated didn’t even come from Ogier on Sunday. He made his most exasperated comment of a difficult year in his return to Citroen so far after SS17, which would be the powerstage later on: “I cannot drive this car.” It’s rare to hear Seb quite so pessimistic. He is now 40 points behind Tanak in the championship.
Instead, the biggest threat to Toyota’s supremacy was the rejuvenated Sordo. But Latvala managed to keep him at arm’s length and held him to fourth over the final Sunday morning.
Latvala needed to be called twice by Tommi Makinen during the weekend to tell him to stop overthinking and just drive his Yaris. Typically, by the time he did that any win chance was long gone, but a second podium in a row means he is playing the team game better than Meeke, even if he probably hasn’t been as quick.
No positions changed on Sunday, that is until the cars reached service after the powerstage, where the rally was seemingly ‘finished’. Sordo handed fourth to Hyundai team-mate Neuville – Sordo taking fifth – and Ogier took seventh from Citroen partner Lappi.
After his transmission issues on Friday, Sordo had moved ahead of Meeke into fourth on the previous test, so without his issues he could have comfortably been on the podium despite his long layoff. His stock in the WRC is rising given his ‘plug in and play’ ability to have time out and still be instantly on the pace.
Instead he had to settle for fifth ahead of Andreas Mikkelsen, who didn’t have any major problems of note all weekend but
still finished behind his team-mates – who were the only two drivers to set fastest stage times outside of Toyota. His last asphalt rally was Monte Carlo so it was fair to expect a slow start, but it took him all the event to adapt to the i20 and, even then, he wasn’t as impressive as you might like towards the end. He also would have finished behind Lappi, had the Finn not given up his spot to Ogier.
Instead, sixth became eighth for Lappi, who struggled when the Citroen was tricky to control on Friday, and then made mistakes when it improved. Still, flashes of pace were there, more so than Mikkelsen at Hyundai.
World Rally Car asphalt new boys Gus Greensmith and Takamoto Katsuta rounded out the top 10. Greensmith was on the pace of many more experienced drivers at times, even if a slight error blotted his copy book with a broken steering arm.
Katsuta finished the rally on his mother’s birthday. Despite his Japanese F3 background, he favours gravel in a rally car and Germany was chosen to remove any expectation from his shoulders. He has a lot of work to do to bring his speed up, but he made it through and scored a point.
Greensmith’s team-mate Teemu Suninen had a hydraulic problem on day one but came on strong after. He was disappointing on his home rally last time out where he has excelled before, but the Finn proved the doubters of his asphalt pace wrong by taking the second quickest time behind Neuvillein the powerstage.
We’ll end where we began and with Tanak’s future. When asked if completing the hat-trick had changed anything, he said: “No.” Don’t ever say Motorsport News doesn’t ask the difficult questions, even if the answers come up short. Perhaps an even tougher question for everyone else is, how can they stop Tanak securing his first WRC crown?