WRC
More than at any other rally, the WRC drivers really need to know where they’re going in Portugal.
It goes without saying that a World Rally Championship driver never wants to have any faults in their pace notes at any event. But if there’s one rally on the WRC calendar where it’s crucial to have the notes absolutely nailed down, it’s Rally de Portugal.
A mixture of blind crests, tight, technical sections and some very high speed passes means that Rally de Portugal is an enormous challenge for both driver and co-driver.
“The difficulty with the Portugal rally is that most of the stages are high speed but not so wide,” says Julien Ingrassia, the man who sits alongside 2013 champion Sébastien Ogier. “There are a lot of little crests that prevent the driver from knowing where he’s putting his wheels.”
“It’s a tricky rally,” agrees Jarmo Lehtinen, co-driver for M-Sport’s Finnish ace Mikko Hirvonen. “There are a lot of places we call ‘sumppu’, which is where the road closes and gets more narrow. There are loads of those places on the fast fourth, fifth and sixth gear corners and it’s easy to clip your wheel on a narrow part and then you go like a merry-go-round!”
Blind crests make life difficult…
While Lehtinen and Hirvonen are used to the crests of their native rally in Finland, the ones in Portugal pose their own particular challenge for the WRC crews.
“Many times you’ll just see blue sky behind the crest and you don’t have the forest or the houses like in Finland to show you the way,” says Lehtinen. “So you just need to blindly call your pace note, whether the note tells you to go on the right side or the left side of the crest. You definitely need to trust that because you can’t really see where the road is going.”
Ogier and Ingrassia learn the hard way
Sébastien Ogier and Julien Ingrassia got a swift lesson about the dangers of the rally's crests in 2009 when a mistake in their notes caused a typically Portuguese crash for the French pair in their Citroën C4.
“It was not a dangerous corner, not somewhere where we could make a mistake,” recalls Ingrassia. “But the pace notes were not correct enough with the detail of how many metres it was from the right crest to the left-hand corner. We went flat over the crest and were out of the line, which meant that we lost the grip and the car hit a tree.
“It was a good lesson for us, and the next year we won Portugal – our first ever WRC victory. But the incident made us realise that we had to change our way of doing pace notes in Portugal and that all of those crests were really important to note.”
Floods in the mix for 2014 as well
As if making the notes for Rally de Portugal wasn’t already difficult enough, the 2014 edition of the rally has already thrown a curve ball at the crews, with many of the stages encountering flash flooding during the recce – with local WRC2 driver Bernardo Sousa even losing his car after it was washed away down a river.
“You cannot be confident of your notes because you could not see the stages,” said Citroën driver Mads Østberg before the start of the rally. “So basically we don’t have the information we need. Usually on stages, you can see some lines, see some cuts, see some stones on the inside or hidden in the lines. But it was impossible to see any of those things. So we’ve just got a basic pace note and we’re going to have to use our eyes!”
Rather them than us…
