All change at the top as the World Rally Championship kicks off on its 14-round, 11-month marathon world tour.
The championship has been launched; all the glitz of Autosport International, with gleaming new cars is over and it is now down to business. And the 2019 WRC sees some seismic changes. Usually, one championship follows the previous one but this time much is different. Hyundai have a new team chief in Andrea Adamo, with Michel Nandan having been unceremoniously ousted. And the new man didn’t look overly popular among the team’s crews at the series launch either!
Hyundai also have new blood in the cockpit, with Seb Loeb – seven times a Monte winner – being brought in, while over at Toyota Kris Meeke is the new name; rightly back in the WRC after his shameful sacking by Citroën. The French outfit itself has been rejuvenated by hiring Seb Ogier as lead driver and the up-and-coming Esapekka Lappi as his wing-man. This move – expensive enough to limit Citroën to just two regular cars this season – at least shows ambition. Ogier is rigorous in his approach and will act as a dose of salts in the Velizy outfit.
This all leaves Malcolm Wilson’s M-Sport squad at something of a disadvantage. However, Wilson himself – who spent heavily on Ogier for the last two seasons – still remains optimistic. While he takes something of a back seat for 2019, leaving the on-event team boss job to Rich Millener, he will still have a guiding hand on the wheel.
But first; before we get down to the nitty-gritty, a bit of a rant…
Scanning through the changes to WRC regulations for 2019 I couldn’t help but notice one insidious little item buried deep.
It said simply this: “The number of test days has been reduced from 55 to 42 for WRC manufacturer teams. The total distance of special stages has been reduced from a maximum of 500 to a maximum of 350 kilometres.”
Now I’ve got no beef with cutting the number of test days allowed. That’s sensible. Every test day for a full team of three cars, (a) costs a fortune and (b) ushers in another round of expensive changes to rally car specs.
No, it’s the slashing back of stage distances that gets my goat. Note that it’s a new MAXIMUM of 350 km…
This is all part of a radical changing of our sport’s face. Pretty soon we’ll have events trimmed to 300 km of stages; then 275. And before we know it we’ll be in the realms of circuit racing, or at the very least, rallycross.
Now no, I’m not a head-in-the-sand opponent of all change and yes, I do understand that aspects of rallying will benefit: more marshals per kilometre; better safety for spectators, quicker response to anything going wrong etc. But something of the essence of rallying is being steadily lost here: It was always man + machine v the elements and the route. Now I’m not so sure. Yes, the new generation of cars are insanely fast. Yes, they must be hugely tiring to control. But wasn’t that what we once said about the introduction of Group B.
Yet Dave Whittock’s RAC Rally of 1985 featured 855.77 km of stages and a road linkage route of 2,609.78 km. I was absolutely knackered at the end of it but I don’t remember any serious shunts on the road sections; Henri Toivonen and Markku Alen were hugely competitive throughout and Tony Pond hauled the Metro 6R4 to third place. As he told me afterwards, he had no complaints. Don’t forget, these were Group B cars; hugely fast tractors compared to today’s World Rally Cars. Everyone said before the event that they’d be uncontrollable on a five-day event the length and breadth of the UK. In fact, Timo Salonen buttonholed me in the lift at our Nottingham hotel to tell me just that. But it wasn’t so, and when I asked Pond about it at the pre-event shakedown, he said: “Those Finns should stop drinking too much and shagging girls on the event… and you can quote me.”
I did!
Yes, this was an exception but back then WRC events often ran to 500 km of stages or more. For sure today’s drivers are not wusses compared to those of 1970s and 1980s. They are fitter, undoubtedly stronger and with better medical and nutritional back-up. So where’s the problem? Why are we cutting events back and back? I reckon the whole movement to shorter rallies is being driven by the manufacturers and rally organisers. They mean less damage to cars and less spending, globally.
So, how long, I wonder before the Sunday run — already absurdly attenuated — is cut completely from the schedule, reducing WRC rallies to two days? How would you then make a difference between the WRC and the ERC? Don’t say it can’t happen. If you’d asked me 10 years ago I’d have said that 350 km of stages was impossibly little..!
And this year the Monte is showing the way here. Its 2019 version has only 16 stages, with a total distance of 323.83 km. All are repeated stages and the longest test appears to be stage 9/11 at a mere 29.82 km. That’s the way forward, my friends: less is more…
But there are some new and extremely interesting driver / car combinations on the French event; including Seb Ogier, in a Citroën, Kris Meeke, driving for Toyota and Seb Loeb, now in a Hyundai. Of them all, Meeke is probably the most fascinating case study. The 39-year-old has not driven in the series since the shunt on last year’s Portuguese Rally led to him being sacked by Citroën. I don’t want to rake it all up again here, suffice to say he is raring to go.
“Considering what has come before, I think this is my best chance,” said Meeke. “My three-year contract with MINI turned out to be six rallies, I went with Citroën when they moved to touring cars, and when the C3 came along it was quite obvious things weren’t right. Now, for the first time ever in my career I feel I’m in the right place at the right time. If someone had asked me at the beginning of 2018 where I’d like to be the following year, I would have said at Toyota.”
In fact, in 2019 he will have both a new car and a new co-driver, with Seb Marshall in place of Paul Nagle. Watch for them, they could easily provide a few shocks to the established order.
“I’d been with Paul for 11 years so the relationship had been cemented for so long,” Meeke said. “But after what happened last year and a bit of time away, I said if I’m going to go back I want a completely fresh start. I’m very happy to have Seb beside me and it has got off to a good start.”
Loeb is another with something to prove. He’s just been on the Dakar marathon, where he finished third, so will have only a very brief test session with his Hyundai World Rally Car before the Monte is flagged away. That won’t necessarily bother him, though the fine edge may be missing at the start. What may still rankle with the nine-time world champion is that he clearly hoped to remain in the Citroën camp for 2019. But the decision to pay Seb Ogier a fortune and grab Esapekka Lappi from Toyota, while having the budget only for a two-car team, put the kybosh on that. The man who has won more world rallies for the French team than anyone else was out in the cold!
Lucky for him, then, that then-Hyundai team chief Michel Nandan was under the cosh to provide winners and a championship trophy. Loeb was a natural fit and now the Monte team – Thierry Neuville, Loeb and Andreas Mikkelsen is a very strong one. This, and Hyundai’s huge budget, should be enough to do the business in 2019. If not, you must feel the team’s long-term prospects must have a cloud over them. The Koreans are not noted for either patience or constant loyalty. Ask former team chief Nandan; shown the door, after hiring Loeb! The new boss Andrea Adamo doesn’t look like a man likely to be swayed by sentiment.
Malcolm Wilson’s M-Sport outfit has undergone some deep off-season thinking, too. The loss of Ogier was a mighty one – even though he cost much more than M-Sport could realistically pay for long. Many of us feared for Wilson’s brilliant little team. The strange reluctance of Ford America to dip into its capacious pockets didn’t help, either. But in the end Wilson committed to 2019, but only with a two-car team, augmented from time to time by Gus Greensmith.
The possibility of hiring Meeke came to nothing, and Østberg was not really considered. In the end, Wilson went with Elfyn Evans and Teemu Suninen. One’s a nearly man who needs to take just one more step up and the other looks a winner in the making. Evans readily admitted he had underperformed last season.
“Last year was very disappointing, the first half especially,” said the Welshman. “A lot of things happened that knocked the wind from my sails. We seemed to go from bad result to bad result for all sorts of different reasons. I was on the back foot and it made it a difficult season. But I felt towards the end of the year that I relaxed a lot more with the driving. We had some really good stage times and I gained a lot from that. I'm confident we demonstrated the speed that we need to win rallies. Now it’s about bringing it together and doing it on every rally."
It’s also true that there are also US-developed mechanical changes coming for the M-Sport Fiestas but my gut feel is that 2019 will be a year of consolidation for the Cumbrian outfit after the fireworks of the last two years.
As for Hyundai, well, what can you say? They’ve got easily the biggest budget; on paper the best driving talent and Wilson must look at their catering spend on team and journos with envy! Yet they’ve underperformed. This year, however, could be their big chance. On paper they shouldn’t be beaten to either title.
The WRC2 class is well represented on the Monte with around 32 entries, including such star names as Gus Greensmith, Yohan Bonato, Ole Christian Veiby, Kalle Rovanperä, Takamoto Katsuka and Guillame de Mevius.
And it wouldn’t be the Monte without a Porsche. This year there is just one, a 997 Carrera RGT for Ian Crera. He’ll be up against an Abarth 124 Rally RGT, driven by Enrico Brazzoli. Listen out for the noise!
In total there are a healthy 84 entries. Not quite up to the 138 entries (117 starters) of that quotidian year, 1985, maybe. But, hey, these are modern times..!
