“Citroen can guide Ogier to seventh title”

It was a moment of unadulterated raw emotion. Sebastien Ogier on the top step of the podium, Esapekka Lappi just one step below and the whole of the Citroen team gathered around them. I was on the other side of the service park but it stopped me in my tracks.

La Marseillaise is the most stirring of national anthems but never have I heard it sung with such astonishingly obvious emotion and meaning. From Ogier to team boss Pierre

Budar, but more evocatively from the rag-tag bunch of loyal Citroen mechanics, to a man and a woman they sang that anthem as loudly, as forcefully and as meaningfully as I have ever heard it sung. There were tears in the eyes of almost all of them. I’m really not sure if they were tears of joy, pride or relief but, my God, that was one hell of a powerful display of exactly what this result means to Citroen.

Let’s just wind things back a couple of weeks to Rally Germany. Ogier was remarkably bullish pre-event – he was coming to Germany with one goal in mind and that was to win. Well, by the end of the event Citroen looked as far away from winners as it was possible to be. The car just wasn’t working and was a million miles away from being competitive. Lots of questions were being asked. How could a car that had won twice on Tarmac possibly be so bad? Was this Citroen C3 WRC so badly engineered in the first place that it was beyond redemption? How long would the Citroen management put up with this level of underperformance?

Well, all of those questions were resoundingly answered here in Turkey. The car was quick, way quicker than the Toyotas that wiped the floor with them in Germany. The car was strong, hardly a spanner needed on either car all weekend. And, perhaps most importantly, the car was driveable. So much so that while just about every other car finished each day looking as if it had been driven hell for leather through an active war zone, the Citroens were almost pristine. Hardly a scratch on them, hardly a dent on the splitters, hardly a piece of aero missing.

This is testament to a couple of things. The drivers, both Ogier and Lappi, were immense in Turkey. They both drove beautifully and cleanly on the most demanding of events with absolute faith in what the car under them was going to do. Absolutely the polar opposite to Germany.

But perhaps more than that, Turkey showed everyone that this car is far from the basket case that some had been not too subtly suggesting it was. While other cars might resemble an aerodynamicist’s wet dream, this is a rally car pure and simple, designed with rallying philosophy at its core.

Now, I’m not saying that Citroen has miraculously sorted all of the engineering issues that have plagued its season so far, but what I am saying is that this car clearly has the potential to deliver Ogier his seventh title come Rally Australia.