Motorsport
Two-time WRC runner-up has ground to recover in this year’s title chase. Luckily, he has a plan
The World Rally Championship is in a peculiar place right now. The new hybrid cars – capable of over 500bhp in short, electron-assisted bursts – are colossally quick. That much was obvious when TG strapped in for a passenger ride in the new Puma WRC a few months back.
But the championship itself? That’s just odd. The two greatest drivers in the history of the sport – who between them have claimed the title every year bar one since two-thousand-and-friggin’-three – are basically now hobbyists. Fun-seekers. Rocking up for a laugh because they’ve earned the right to come and go as they please.
Don’t get us wrong, watching Sebastiens Loeb and Ogier go toe-to-toe at the Monte Carlo Rally in January was awesome. But neither is doing the full WRC campaign now, choosing instead to go racing elsewhere and leaving the rest to scrap it out for the prize they’ve won nine and eight times respectively.
That’s the perception, at least. Another way of looking at it is that we won’t get a world champion this year who’d got bored of their own success. And perhaps that’s a much healthier outlook. Better to have a winner who was hungry for it than one who’d had their starter, main, seconds and pudding. In every restaurant on the street.
The door is as wide open as it’s been in literal decades, but who’ll walk through it? Thierry Neuville has finished second in the standings six times and no one could begrudge that final step to a driver of his calibre. Could Ott Tanak repeat his 2019 glory year? What about the current leader Kalle Rovanpera?
Another name on the shortlist is Elfyn Evans, who TG caught up with in Monaco’s service park hours before the start of the new season. The Welshman has had a taste of Neuville’s medicine in finishing second to Ogier twice on the bounce, though 2020 was especially painful. Evans had a healthy lead heading into the finale at Rally Monza but crashed out in icy conditions. Sportingly he scrambled out of his car to warn the next man through – the Frenchman, but of course – who duly stole the championship.
Did the frustrating end make him a better driver at least? “I’m not sure it changes a lot,” he says, “you just get up and go again anyway. Of course it’s a disappointment in the moment, but it doesn’t really change how you approach next season.”
2021 was another year where the Toyota driver found himself so close yet so far. A couple of wins and five more podiums marked his most consistent showing to date. “Unfortunately for me, the issue was that Seb was always on top of the podium,” he concludes. “That’s where he really builds his advantage.”
What would he do differently now? “Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely things we could’ve done in terms of performance. But there’s not a lot more you could’ve done in terms of effort. I felt… fairly burnt out at the end of last year to be honest.”
The winter break – if you can call it that, so small was the gap between 2021’s finale and pre-season testing – gave Evans the chance to “knock the travelling on its head”, return home to Wales and briefly unwind. Knowing neither Ogier nor Loeb would be in the frame for 2022 must’ve been on plenty of drivers’ minds over New Year, but even before a single stage had been run Evans knew there’d be bumps in the road.
“In a year where perhaps things are a bit more unpredictable because we don’t know about reliability, we don’t know always how the car will react. I’m sure we’re going to see a few more low scores or DNFs throughout the year, so you can never take anything for granted.
“All I try to do is go to every rally and give my best. So regardless of the circumstances it’s quite easy to still go with that plan. Go to every rally, try your best, do the best preparation you can and see what happens at the end of the year. That’s it really, the rest is simple.”
Wise words. And Evans needs to heed them now more than ever. Two rounds into the season and his challenge is yet to ignite: he was the only driver who could hold a candle to the Sebs at the Monte, but a mistake left his GR Yaris teetering on a bank and out of contention. He was in the hunt for victory again at Rally Sweden, but further incidents led to a penalty, and then retirement.
Luckily for the 33-year-old there are still 11 rounds to go, starting with Rally Croatia this week. And the drivers are yet to work out how to extract the most performance from the new formula in which ‘EV Mode’ is still an alien concept for some fans lining up at the service parks. Evans laughs: “They expect to hear noisy rally cars and you just creep up on them!”
Joking aside, the freshness of the new regulations (Evans reckons only “the buttons on the steering wheel maybe” have been carried over from last year’s car) and his underlying pace so far means a title push is still just about on the cards. The key is finding harmony with this season’s package.
“The difficult part is really understanding how to achieve it best, you know? It’s very easy to say ‘Oh, I’d like to have more front end’. Generally all drivers want more front end, but do you go to the diff? Do you go to the chassis? Do you go to the roll bars? Whatever. There’s so many opportunities.”
Keyword: Elfyn Evans: ‘Just get up and go again’