NO TURKISH DELIGHT FOR TANAK AS OGIER TAKES VICTORY
Citroen and Ogier bounce back from Germany woe with impressive win in Turkey
Last month in Germany, Sebastien Ogier bemoaned an ‘undriveable’ Citroen C3 WRC. But uncatchable replaced undriveable for the defending World Rally champion in Turkey last week.
For the second year in succession, the hard-baked roads around Marmaris wreaked havoc with the drivers’ championship. Twelve months ago, Ott Tanak was the chief beneficiary as his Toyota tortoise laughed in the face of a pair of hares named Ogier and Thierry Neuville. It was the other way around this time. Except for Neuville, whose title aspirations were tripped up once again.
Wednesday evenings ahead of WRC rounds have always been an ideal opportunity to catch the drivers in a more relaxed mood. Post-recce, preshakedown, there’s chat to be had. Fat to be chewed.
That changed last Wednesday.
Nearing the business end of the championship, messages had to be delivered. No room for empty rhetoric or soundbites. It was time for the big three to ramp up the psychology.
Well aware his rivals had to take risks in an effort to cut into his championship lead, Tanak railed against the majority view that Friday’s roads were catastrophically rough.
“They’re not so bad,” he smiled. “Actually, it’s quite OK. It’s similar to last year. In places they are better than they used to be – the organisers have been working and grading the roads. It’s still challenging and rough as hell, but it’s definitely better than it used to be.”
Part-invitation, part-dare, Tanak was encouraging his rivals to crack on through the opening day.
Forty points down on his former M-sport team-mate, Ogier was straight down the line. “It will be a lottery,” said the Citroen man. “Anything can happen on Friday – you cannot control those conditions.”
Sandwiched between those two in the table was Hyundai’s Neuville. The Belgian, 33 points behind Tanak, was still on the front foot from nearly putting the Toyota star to the sword in Germany. Now it was time to finish the job a Panzerplatte puncture had ruined last time out.
He brushed aside the potential for more punctures on the roughest roads of the season. The trademark broad grin and swagger were firmly in place. “I have a good feeling that this is going to be our rally,” he said. “We are going to finish ahead of Ott. We have to.”
Had he learned nothing from seeing the left-front damper punch its way through the bonnet of his i20 Coupe
WRC on these very roads last year?
“There’s not much to learn,” he said. “That was a mechanical failure. Before that, we were fastest by far.”
In cricketing parlance, Tanak’s approach to Friday morning was surely going to involve a straight bat. Apparently not. He stepped forward and took a big swing at the tyre selection bouncer. He took three mediums and three hards – a gamble for a man who didn’t need to gamble. The softer Michelin is just that. With rocks reported to be the size of tellies (the oldschool big, boxy ones – we’re not talking slinky flat-screens here) he needed his boots to be as tough as possible.
“I was surprised as well, regarding his position in the championship,” said Ogier after the first loop. “OK, when you are first on the road there is some loose around and maybe not so many rocks have been pulled out, but it’s still just luck. For me, the choice was a very risky one. I had a puncture in the first stage this morning and if that happened to him then it’s over, he’s not coming back.”
Predictably, Tanak didn’t see it that way. No gambling from his side. But plenty of road cleaning.
Armageddon looked to have been put on hold. There were a handful of cars with punctures, but no massive dramas. The second pass would be chaos. Or so the theory went.
Icmeler second time through was insane. Sitting alongside Toyota team principal Tommi Makinen for the afternoon’s opener was like watching a cage fighter’s significant other observing their partner being pummeled. He winced, flinched, shut his eyes and shook his head.
He needn’t have worried, they made it through. Granted, 7-8-9 (with Kris Meeke quickest of the Yaris trio ahead of Tanak and Jari-matti Latvala) didn’t have quite the same ring as the 1-2-3 delivered at the end of the previous round, but Friday the 13th was done.
Up front, Citroen was running 1-2, with Esapekka Lappi building on the brilliant Rally Finland pace he showed last time the cars were on the gravel.
Ogier was second, with Neuville just seven tenths behind him.
The speed of the C3 caught everybody by surprise. Yes, Craig Breen had led in Turkey last season, but last month’s German disaster remained at the forefront of everybody’s mind.
Citroen delivered new geometry in Rally Finland and, while the two surfaces had little in common, chassis control aboard the C3 WRC had taken a step forward, regardless of the dirt’s lumpiness.
Ogier wasn’t worried about Lappi, knowing full well the amiable Finn would play the game if and when he was asked. But Neuville? He was close. And confident. He’d struggled for grip through the morning, but found more confidence and traction in the afternoon.
Traction on Friday afternoon was, however, compromised for everybody when the threatened rain arrived in the day’s penultimate test. Intermittent at the start, the last few kilometres became a mud bath and the drivers further back on the road started to ship close to a minute to their rivals up front. Neuville was fastest. A puncture in the stage before forced him to take a softer spare on the car but, as the rain fell, Neuville must have offered up a silent prayer of thanks for the added compound grip.
Asked about the gap to Ogier on
Friday night, Neuville grinned and offered a cheeky wink as he prepared to move his Hyundai into service.
If Tanak’s choice of covers had taken a few by surprise on Friday morning, the intrigue surrounding Ogier’s car a day later was greater still. And the Frenchman wasn’t helping himself; surrounded by red shirts and Michelin engineers, the intensity of the debate was as obvious as the reward on offer.
Still without wheels, the C3 WRC was fired up… more talking. Five LTX Forces were delivered, but how many were coded H4 and how many M6? The team gave nothing away. Rival teams dispatched spies but, as usual, black tape on the sidewall foiled any potential intelligence.
Only once the cars were all on the road north towards the morning’s Yesilbelde opener was the story told.
Ogier had spent ages doing his homework, studying the onboards; he could make this one fly: three mediums and two hards. Now that, according to the rest of the service park, was a gamble. Yes, a good chunk of the 20-miler was buried deep beneath loose gravel, but Ogier was running last-but-one of the World Rally Cars. If the cars ahead swept the stones aside, the mediums could be destroyed.
And the early indication from SS8 split times was that the road was cleaning, but Ogier took everything to another level, 16.7s faster than his team-mate and
second fastest man, Lappi.
Ogier had delivered the stage of the rally, if not the season, to come within a second of the lead. It was another staggering display of just how well he can look after a set of boots. “Looks like the time’s not too bad,” he smiled. “I killed the tyre at the end, but that was the plan.”
The end of the stage wasn’t the time or place for a debrief on his thinking an hour or so earlier, he’d got some rooted rubber to shuffle around before the next stage. All that hard work in the weekend’s opener could be undone if he ran out of grip in the next two. He didn’t.
And, by the time he got back to service, his morning had got even better. That Neuville threat? Gone.
Baffled by the dust, the Belgian toppled off the road on a slow-speed Yesilbelde left-hander.
“It was a slow right into a tight left,” Neuville explained. “I was looking for the [left] corner, then I thought: ‘Ahh, maybe I’m already in the corner…’
I saw some opening and turned. It wasn’t there. It was like a wall and we fell off it. The car was on its side and Nicolas [Gilsoul, co-driver] and I had to get out to put the car back on its wheels. The only people who were there was a wife and her husband. They helped. It was their house. Their wall.”
Neuville’s woes moved Tanak from eighth to seventh. Struggling to make the hard tyre work aboard the Yaris, the Estonian was grateful for anything. Stopping a few miles down the road from the finish of Yesilbelde, Tanak considered his options to find more speed from the Toyota. Given the nod from co-driver Martin Jarveoja, the pair went through the familiar ritual of getting helmets and HANS devices on. Leaning in to flick the switch and send fuel on a familiar journey, the Yaris turned over but didn’t catch. Strange.
Off the starter. Back on, another go. Same thing. Nothing. Call the team.
Try again. Nothing. Helmets off. Stress levels start to rise.
Realising something was wrong, the WRC’S All Live feed cut to the number eight Toyota. A variety of voyeuristic camera angles caught an increasingly desperate Tanak and Jarveoja doing all they could to get the thing to fire. It was all to no avail. Their day was done.
Unlike in Rally Italy, where a powersteering problem cost Tanak the win, there was no raging into the service park. This time he’d retired from seventh and was sat by the side of the road long enough for the immediate anger to subside. Towed back to Marmaris, the briefest of debriefs was done and Tanak was bound for an afternoon on the beach.
“It’s quiet time now,” was what a Tanak aide offered.
With three hours to sort the car for a superally Sunday, the mechanics had the job done in 15 minutes. That’s how long it took to change the car’s ECU.
Confirmation of the problem brought the obvious question from one of the M-sport engineers: “If it was the ECU, why didn’t he just fit the spare?”
After more than two decades at the very top of world rallying, the
Cumbrians are a canny bunch who’d seen it all before. All their Ford Fiestas were deployed stage-bound with an ECU as part of an extensive spares package.
Asked on Saturday evening if he carried a spare in his Citroen, Ogier replied: “I don’t know.” Cutting the interview short and asked where he was off to, he answered over his shoulder… “I’m going to make sure we have one in the car tomorrow!”
Not that Ogier had anything to fear from his nearest rival, team-mate Lappi. The Finn was the perfect wingman for the defending champ. But just to confirm the Parisian policy, the drivers were called immediately after Ogier’s spellbinding run through SS8.
Ogier would go P1. Copy?
They copied. And, typically, Lappi was utterly magnanimous. His only concern being, with third-placed Andreas Mikkelsen more than a minute behind, keeping enough speed to focus the attention.
“I stalled the engine braking for a hairpin this afternoon,” said
Lappi. “That’s why we need to keep the concentration!”
For the third day on the spin, tyre talk was everywhere on Sunday morning. But mostly focused on Tanak’s Toyota. Time to go and the tyre trolley emerged… with only four wheels on. The ultimate gamble was saved for the final stage. Tanak would run with no spare on some of the season’s roughest roads. The upside? Saving 23kg. Downside? A puncture would spell the end. He felt he had nothing to lose, running in the worst place on the road. The more conservative counselled that, even with a spare, he should be more than capable of three points.
Tanak wasn’t listening. His mind made up, he wanted all five and backed himself. Back from the beach, he was quickest through a sighting lap of the Marmaris test, which would offer bonus points on the repeat. After that, he crawled through the next two, nursing the tyres, slower than he’d gone on the recce.
The rhythm change for Tanak was ridiculous. Slower than the recce on SS16, he ripped into the final test at a speed nobody could match. Neuville was second quickest as he sought to repair the damage done a day earlier. Ogier? Third. But a 47th WRC victory was his. And so was second in the championship.
Even better for the reds, it was a first 1-2 since Meeke led Mads Ostberg home in Argentina four years ago.
Ogier blew hard when he stepped from the podium. “I needed this,” he smiled. “I really needed this.”