CITROEN SUFFERS AGAIN WITH HANDLING ISSUE IN GERMANY
Set-up woe leaves reigning champion with only a handful of title points
Citroen has blamed its poor showing on Rally Germany on its pre-event test, as Sebastien Ogier took a huge hit in the drivers’ championship following his seventh place finish.
Citroen brought an engine upgrade to Germany, with Ogier claiming a victory was his only target in the roads surrounding the Mosel river, where Citroen won 12 straight rallies between 2001 and 2013 (there was no Rally Germany in 2009).
However, it was clear from the start that something was not right with the C3 WRC, as Ogier and his team-mate Esapekka Lappi struggled with crippling understeer and failed to win a single stage.
Although the team was able to improve the C3 with changes through the event, Ogier had just been demoted to fourth in a heavy fight with the Toyotas of Kris Meeke and Jari-matti Latvala when he got a puncture in the Panzerplatte stage late on Saturday evening.
On Sunday morning, Ogier added: “I can do absolutely nothing. The stage is fine for me, but I cannot drive this car.”
Citroen boss Pierre Budar told MN: “We have still issues with the set-up of the car, we had a difficult test session, it was quite difficult to do a proper test here. We discovered some effect of the set-up straight [away] in the race. We still have some work to do.
“It’s not completely clear but we know what are the main items and what we have to look at.”
Following the event, Budar went into greater detail. He said: “We thought we had understood the reasons for our below-par performance in Corsica and had made the necessary changes for this Tarmac round. We were closer to the leaders this weekend than in Corsica, but still too far away to be satisfied. We clearly missed something in our preparations.
“The only full day of testing conducted by Sebastien and Julien [Ingrassia, co-driver] was disrupted by rain, something we didn’t have during the rally in the end. So that prevented us from completing our test programme on dry Tarmac.”
Following his frustrations during the event, Ogier said:
“I’m still going to keep fighting, like I have always done.”
Lappi sacrificed his sixth-place finish to allow Ogier to rise one position to seventh, with Hyundai’s Andreas Mikkelsen promoted to sixth and Lappi ending up eighth.