MILLENER: OUR YOUNGER LINE-UP CAN HELP M-SPORT MOVE FORWARDS IN THE FUTURE
Youngsters Gus Greensmith, Teemu Suninen and Adrien Fourmaux for British Ford squad this season
M-Sport team principal Richard Millener has defended the team’s youthful World Rally Championship driver line-up for 2021, telling Motorsport News that it meant the difference between competing or sitting out the upcoming season.
Briton Gus Greensmith will contest the full schedule in a Ford Fiesta WRC, but the 24-year-old has made only nine starts in a World Rally Car and described his 2020 season at the top level as “pretty disastrous” when speaking to MN.
His team-mates Adrien Fourmaux and Teemu Suninen, who will share a second Fiesta, are 25 and 26 respectively. Although Suninen has scored WRC podiums and stage wins, Frenchman Fourmaux, a frontrunner in WRC 2, has yet to compete at the sport’s highest tier.
While Millener concedes the team had no option other than to recruit younger, partly-funded drivers due to the financial impact of Covid-19 , he’s adamant that M-Sport should not be discounted.
“It’s very easy to look from the outside and expect us to come up with a championship-winning driver like we have many times in the past, but we’re not in a position to do that,” Millener told MN. “We’ve had to make 75 people redundant in the last 10 months. We have to sell cars in order to be [in the WRC] and car sales were massively hurt last year. We have 120 people employed at M-Sport in the UK. Putting it bluntly, do you employ a driver that would cost the same amount as all their wages combined or do you keep 120 people employed? It’s not a question we asked ourselves.
“We don’t have any budget to pay a driver, but we don’t feel like the three we have chosen are reserves or anything like that,” Millener continued. “We want to work with them and help them as much as we can because we believe in them. We’re very happy with what we’ve managed to do considering all the business constraints we’ve been under and it’s great to be able to put out a twocar team in the WRC. If I was to speak as a fan, it’s what any fan would want to see.”
As well as working to increase Suninen’s programme, Millner is hopeful of fielding additional World Rally Cars on selected events later in the season: “There are some interesting events and it may be that we can find a way to get some other people in,” he said.
Millener admitted however that sitting out 2021 was a possibility but it would never have got M-Sport boss Malcolm Wilson’s approval. “It’s a very simple way to cut a lot of budget and concentrate on just selling customer cars. But Malcolm loves the WRC and it brings a lot to the company. It would have been the easy way out but none of us wanted that option so we were always going to try to find a way to be here and again we’ve done it.”