WHY JORDAN LIKES A BIT OF ROUGH
MN’S columnist on his love for rallycross
“When a rallycross car launches off the line, it is like all hell breaks loose…”
In another world, I would be sitting pretty at the top of the World Rally Championship points table right now. That was my dream when I started out in motorsport. I wasn’t interested in circuit racing. For me, it was all about sliding around between the trees. At the start of my career in 2003, I did a rally academy and then went into Junior Rallycross. I wanted to learn about driving on the loose and you get so much seat time in that discipline. I was doing eight to 10 races a day. If I made a mistake in one race, I could get straight back out there and do it again.
It was only when I got into rallycross that I realised that I liked the racing side too. Having said that, if I could have made my living out of rallycross, I would have. When coming up through the ranks, though, the profile wasn’t there and nor were the commercial opportunities and so the move to the circuits was sponsor-led.
The reason I love rallycross so much is simply because there is no bullshit. There is no balance of performance rubbish. It is probably one of the few forms of motorsport where you have no interference with it. I love that. Don’t get me wrong, a couple of years ago Johan Kristoffersson won 11 out of 12 rounds of the World Rallycross Championship and did that turn people off the sport? Probably a bit, but from a purists’ point of view, he was the fastest driver in the fastest car. That is how it should be.
There is nothing like the buzz of doing a rallycross start and then going flat out for four or five laps. A lot of the time you can’t even tell people what had just happened. It is so much of a blur: nothing replicates that feeling. You are not looking after the tyres, the car or any of that. You start and then go as fast as you can.
The start process is brutal, and never does it feel slow in those cars. I remember when I did an event in the World RX in France in an MJP Ford Fiesta in 2018. I hadn’t done any testing, and first launch I did was just before practice and f**king hell, did it put a smile on my face! With those cars, you don’t really have to have any finesse – you aren’t slipping the clutch or doing anything like that. You side-step the clutch as quickly as you can and you hope you have got the rev limit set right and the launch control parameters set right.
Unlike other forms of motorsport, you get a ‘ready to race’ light come on and then there is a wait of between one and four seconds. You are flat on the throttle and you have got the car loaded up against the handbrake. The car gets such a hard time. As soon as you see the light, you drop the clutch and release the handbrake, but you can also hear all of the other cars as well bouncing off their anti-lag systems and their rev limiters.
You don’t know what sort of start you are going to get. In a BTCC car, for example, you know how you initially let the clutch out. You know, from feel, what the getaway will be like and how much clutch work you have to do. In a rallycross car, you just release it and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. If you had it set 200rpm too low and it will bog down, it will be a complete stop.
You can dictate certain things when you feel the car’s attitude against the handbrake, whether that is feeling how much the car is squatting, hearing now much grief it is giving the clutch, and the rest of the car. That can influence it. I’ve said there is not much finesse, but there are a lot of intuitive things you can do. But, when it starts, it is like all hell breaks loose. It is mental. It is really quite hard to explain the buzz you get from that: it is super intense.
I remember one thing: in 2015, at the start of the year, I had pretty much got an offer on the table to go and drive for the Kenneth Hansenrun Peugeot Red Bull team. Because of my BTCC contract with Pirtek, I couldn’t do it because there were too many date clashes. You can imagine, when I was driving that shitbox MG that season, how many times it went through my head that I could have been in a factory rallycross car instead…
People shouldn’t underestimate World Rallycross, because there are some really quick guys in it. I have driven Mattias Ekstrom’s car, which was so impressive and to work with him was another level again. I remember going to a test in 2015 and I sat in with him.
Where I had been trying to feel for the grip on the dirt with the accelerator, using partthrottle to try and reduce the wheelspin, he was just nailed everywhere. I asked him afterwards why wasn’t he searching for the grip like I was. He said that the wheelspin helped bite though the dirt and get into the grippy stuff underneath it. I couldn’t believe what he had been doing, and it became clear that maybe I was giving the car too much respect. I watched him change gear and he called it a ‘karate kick’. It was amazing how fast he stamped on the clutch and changed gear while still being flat to the boards. That changed my approach a little bit.
In a top car, and given some time, I would run at the front in World RX. That would always excite me. When I do my guest outings, I am always in at the deep end a bit. In a BTCC race, I know the warm-up process, I know the start procedure. I am familiar with all of that. When I go in as a wildcard, I always feel, by the time of the Saturday evening, that I want to start the weekend again. I have gone through a day of getting used to the car, the start procedures, and I’m familiar with the operation of the car. There is a lot to take in. I always felt quite green going in as a one-off but eventually it slows down and it becomes normal.
I often get asked it if helps with circuit racing. Often you will hear TV commentators say that the rallycross guys would come to the fore if it is wet, but the styles are so different there isn’t a lot of transfer of skills. It enables me to be comfortable with the car being out of shape, whether that is in the wet or somewhere like Knockhill, where you go through the top of Duffus Dup on two wheels with a bit of opposite lock. I am comfortable with that, but that is as far as it goes. If anything, it makes the BTCC feel a bit tame. When you come from a rallycross car into a BTCC one, life slows down a bit.
Rallycross will always be something I will try and do whenever I get the chance. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend you go along: it will knock your socks off.