The season that unlocked Meeke’s WRC career

Drivers weren’t exactly spoilt for career opportunities in the World Rally Championship come 2009.

The global financial crisis of 2008 forced Subaru’s hand as it headed for the exit door. Japanese neighbor Suzuki followed suit after just one year with its SX4 WRC program.

Sébastien Loeb and Dani Sordo (Citroën) and Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala (Ford) were the WRC’s only pukka works drivers at this time. Everyone else was competing for satellite, or private, teams like Stobart, the Citroën Junior Team or the Munchi’s World Rally Team (remember them!?).

That made it an extremely bad time for any aspiring driver to force their way through the revolving door. Take Kris Meeke for example.

“I was still with Colin [McRae] at that time and I remember him saying, ‘this is it, it’s going to go through a barren patch, there’s going to be no opportunities’ because at that time there were only four factory drivers in the world championship.”

After his Junior WRC program with Citroën ended after 2006, Meeke’s career was on the brink. He went back home to Northern Ireland, worked at a rally school and didn’t do much of note for 18 months.

But then…

“A guy offered me to do a rally in Ireland in a Renault Clio Super 1600,” Meeke tells DirtFish. “We managed to set a few fastest times outright against the World Rally Cars, and it raised attention.”

Little did he know it at the time, but this chance drive in his local championship would lead to Meeke becoming (and remaining) the fastest driver on a WRC rally, ever.

Renault reached out to the then 29-year-old and asked him to compete in Rally Russia, 2008, behind the wheel of a Clio R3. Russia at that time was a round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge, and so a new door was about to open.

Not on the stages though, weirdly. But at the hotel bar instead.

“The Clio R3 had no ground clearance, the dampers weren’t enough, and the sump burst so the rally was over,” Meeke remembers. “But we were staying in the same hotel as Kronos, who I had fond memories of having worked with Marc Van Dalen back in 2005.

“He was staying in the same hotel, and we sat at the bar drinking some vodka. And he said to me, ‘I think I might have a plan. I think I could get you into the IRC next year’.

“So he phoned me a week later, and there was a Belgian guy who was head of Peugeot UK marketing, Christian Stein, who subsequently went on to be head of Seat marketing worldwide, and everything came down to him. Between Marc Van Dalen’s relationship with Christian Stein, he sort of joined the dots and a program was born to do the IRC in 2009.

“So yeah… it’s just mad how it works! It’s a typical rally world [story[, you know. It’s just mad how you put yourself in one situation and suddenly it opens the door.”

The deal was for Meeke to represent Peugeot UK, driving a 207 S2000 for the 2009 season in a championship promoted by Eurosport Events that was beginning to grow legs.

“They created a concept which I believe to this day is the way to create a world championship,” Meeke says. “Manufacturers would produce a car, develop it, spend the money developing it, and then it’s up to the regional importers to run the program.

“And that really created a nationalistic thing. Everyone was in equal machinery as regards, you know, like Peugeot Belgium, Peugeot France, Peugeot Portugal, Peugeot Spain, Peugeot UK got involved, Peugeot Italy got involved. And the local importer could run a car.

“The concept was right and Eurosport were behind, and they revolutionized it. They were the first ever company to put live onboards and do a live TV show. I remember Monte 09 was just incredible. You know, people could sit in the pub and watch live onboards of you going through Col de Turini, it was mental.

“All credit to them. They created an incredible product and it was fascinating for a few years.”

And Meeke was about to make full use of what was at his disposal.

Co-driven by Paul Nagle, the pair kicked their season off in Monte Carlo where he’d face stiff competition from Freddy Loix (Peugeot), Juho Hänninen (Škoda) and a certain Sébastien Ogier (Peugeot). Meeke was a creditable fourth after the second leg.

He takes up the story: “We went into the first stage of the final morning and it had snowed heavily overnight, but then the temperatures climbed and it started to rain. So there was about two feet of snow on the road, but it started to rain and it turned to just full slush.

“I remember after one kilometer of the stage, it went onto a straight, which was about 1.5km long, but there’d been about three or four cars through before me, and they had sort of splashed the slush out, so you had perfect grip on two rails of Tarmac.

“I just started plucking the gears, trying to thread the eye of a needle up the straight, and all of a sudden, it got up on top of the slush, and away it went. I was a passenger, it aquaplaned and the car was completely destroyed, so it was… yeah. Not the best start.”

But three wins on the bounce in Brazil, the Azores and Ypres would soon correct that. Of the three, Ypres was the statement. You are not supposed to head to the infamous Belgian ditches and win on your first attempt, but Meeke did.

“I was lucky to have Freddy Loix as my team-mate,” Meeke reveals. “Freddy obviously is, you know, a Belgian guy, has done Ypres and won it a million times or whatever.

“But I remember at the test for Ypres, at lunchtime, I went and chatted to the engineers and compared my data to Freddy’s. And Freddy was like, I don’t know, a second per km quicker than me over a road of 3km. He was three seconds up on me! ‘F****** hell, I said, I can’t join the dots here’.

“So Freddy kindly offered to let me sit in with him for a run, and I just went, ‘Ah, I realize what you need to do here’. In Ypres, because there’s so many straight lines and just junctions, the apex speed on the junction is everything. If you are too fast and you have a hesitation on the throttle at the exit, you lose for the next 500 meters.

“So you have to be at the completely perfect speed at the apex – it’s not spectacular or not anything. But anyway, I learned a lot from Freddy in that one run. And by the end of the test, I was quicker than him and went on to have a huge battle with him at the rally.

“I remember after 180kms of stages, there was 0.8 seconds between us. We managed to keep the rhythm and get in front. And as soon as we got in front, Freddy got a puncture and then we were able to take a victory.

“But we were also able to achieve something else: we were the only crew to go to Ypres and win on the first time, other than Henri Toivonen. I think that record still stands to this day. That was one I was particularly proud of.”

But more than that, a championship title was increasingly becoming a possibility.

“Once you get in front of the championship, then you start believing,” Meeke admits. “I remember in the Azores, confidence was high, we were leading the rally and we got held at the start-line of the last stage of the evening, which was like a 20km stage.

“And we’re all sitting there, all the crews we’re standing in a group chatting away. And the stage organizer came up and said, ‘There’s a delay, we don’t know if it’s going to run’. And at that time I was thinking, please run, because I know I can put more seconds into these guys.

“That’s when you know you have the confidence to go on and do something in the championship. So it was probably from Azores on. We won in Brazil, which was a new event for everybody, but then Azores was where I started to really build the confidence and knew that we could do something.”

Confidence is a brilliant aid, but doesn’t seal the deal alone. Meeke needed to keep his head – which hasn’t always been a trait best associated with his career, but it’s exactly what he did 15 years ago.

Rallies, and results, were reeled off one by one. Škoda’s Jan Kopecký was emerging as Meeke’s big rival for the title thanks to a string of second places – the Czech’s cause boosted by back-to-back wins in Barum and Asturias.

The penultimate round in Sanremo was going to be critical, with Meeke leading Kopecký by just one point. And an on-form Kopecký set the pace on the opening stage, but he wouldn’t emerge from the second – running wide in the dark and ripping a wheel off his Fabia.

“But my championship still wasn’t done,” Meeke points out. “All these Italian specialists were registered for the championship.”

Meeke didn’t need to win the title in Italy. Rally of Scotland was still to come (which Meeke did win on the road before later being excluded for an underweight front subframe). He was fourth heading into the final day of Sanremo, but arose in the mood to take a championship.

“I woke up, and whatever went on, it was one of my days where the stars aligned,” he says. “We started to take huge chunks out of everybody. And I went from fourth to first and won the rally, which got me the championship a round early.

“Everything came easy. Like I say, it was one of those days for me when the stars aligned. Yeah… it was just an amazing feeling.”

Meeke found that gorgeous flow where it all came without really trying. He’s not a religious man, but there was great symbolism in being able to do what he did.

“It’s a wee bit like Ayrton Senna back in the day when he said he had an out of body experience driving the car. It’s when you get into the zone, but unfortunately in this world there’s guys like Loeb and Ogier and Rovanperä who just live in that 24/7,” Meeke laughs.

“The rest of us normal beings, we just float in and out of it sometimes and it’s hard to know when the stars aligned, you know? That day was it. But it was particularly poignant on that day. I’ll never forget it.

“It was the 26th of September, 2009. And not to bring up family issues, but my mother had passed away in the year 2000, nine years previous, on the 26th of September. And I’ll never forget, I’d done all my things at the end of the stage, drove down the road section a bit, and my brother couldn’t get up into the finish.

“I met my brother about a mile down the road from the finish and I got out of the car and both of us sat in the barrier and we both just cried, because we knew that was nine years to the day since my mother passed away.

“So that was huge… hugely significant for me. And I don’t know why that day, the stars aligned, maybe, you know, it was something with that, but yeah, that was… it was probably one of the most important days of my career.”

Nobody really realized it at the time, but in the same way the IRC helped launch the WRC careers of Thierry Neuville and Andreas Mikkelsen, Meeke’s 2009 success opened the door to the sport’s top level.

“That championship was the reason I got opportunities in the World Rally Championship, without a doubt,” he says.

“Even at the beginning of 2010, David Richards had made a call about the Mini project, albeit that ended up in a dud project. But still, I have to say, that opportunity in the Mini transformed me from being an IRC driver to a WRC driver. Even though the program didn’t last, it put me into the frame.

“It catapulted me into the World Rally Championship.”

Meeke has nothing but gratitude for Van Dalen and Stein who not only facilitated the IRC drive that unlocked his future WRC career, but marketed it superbly.

“Peugeot UK had the initiative, and Christian Stein had the initiative and foresight; he not only put the money behind the rally program, he put the same amount of money behind marketing it,” Meeke believes.

“And back then, we did two TV adverts that appeared on national TV, you know, that doesn’t happen nowadays. We were on national TV ads. They got Becs [Williams] and Colin Clark along to do like a vlog. Twitter and iPhones weren’t even a thing back then, but they had the initiative to create their own little vlog at the end of each day and did a report.

“And they really put the money behind the marketing, so they did it right. They know what it takes. You can’t just put the money behind a rally program and expect it to market itself, you know? So those guys really had the initiative.

“I feel so lucky to have been part of that initiative. And it was all through the foresight of Christian Stein, you know? So yeah really, really happy with being part of that program.”

Save for this year when he claimed the Portuguese championship title in a Hyundai Rally2, IRC 2009 stands as the only other outright title Meeke has ever claimed. Was it his best season behind the wheel?

“It was one of them,” he replies, “but I still look back at 2016 in the WRC as probably the height of my career. We were still in a DS3, Citroën had taken a year out, it went to PH Sport, the factory program, we were all still under Abu Dhabi, it was still Citroën engineers and mechanics there and stuff, but it was under a PH Sport banner and Volkswagen were at their height then.

“You know, the DS3 was an aging car at that time, and we shouldn’t have been able to… like throughout ’14, ’15, ’16 we were fighting against Volkswagen who rewrote the rulebook in terms of how you build a rally car. They just evolved the sport in terms of suspension and everything, and we were certainly behind in terms of what machinery had.

“But I was the only one able to try to fight them and never give up and continue to battle them. But in 2016 I battled Ogier all the way in Monte. I honestly think I could have beaten him until Thierry Neville turned up a… he drove over a manhole and the manhole dislodged and it came up and ripped the sump guard off. The next stage was Sisteron and Ogier chose the wrong tires and we had already made our tire choice before and I reckon I could have won Monte that year.

“Ifs and buts. If your granny had balls, she’d be your granddad! Anyway, I was competitive with Ogier in his backyard. Went to Sweden and something similar happened, somebody turned up a stone and it just cut my a-arm. I had actually taken the lead mid-stage on the splits, if you look closely enough at it.

“Yeah, not to go into detail, but 2016 was the year where I was riding the crest of a wave in terms of speed and performance. We won Finland that year, we won Portugal. I think it was purely a fact that I went through a big negotiation the year before.

“Tommi [Mäkinen] had tried to sign me for Toyota, even though the project wouldn’t start until 2017. I would have had to take a year out. In hindsight, did I make the right move? I don’t know. But still, it was the fact of getting a three-year contract with Citroën, you know, you’re able to have a financially secure contract that will keep my family [secure]. And I think just that vote of confidence, it transforms a driver, you know? So once you get into that league, then away you go

“So ultimately 2016 I’d say was my best year, but 2009 is definitely a close second.”

And Meeke still cherishes his memories of competing in the IRC at that time.

“God, it was 15 years ago, but we still talk about it,” he smiles. “I still meet Juho Hänninen quite often. I meet Jan Kopecký at Škoda tests, I met Giandomenico Basso when he was in Madeira last year, and all of us, every time we meet, we talk about how good the IRC was back in ’09 and ’10.

“Not even from the rallies we went to, the places we went to, but the social aspect. We all enjoyed ourselves. We had a good piss-up after the rallies. It was proper enjoyment. And that’s one thing that you see in WRC now, it’s so uptight with watching on-boards and everything else… it’s completely sterile.

“I keep thinking: ‘Wow, imagine you’re born 20 years sooner and you lived through the 80s and 90s, that would have been mega’. I think that would have been my era, but I’m very, very fortunate to have had the crack at it when I did.

“It was really cool – definitely one of the fondest eras of my career.”

It’s just amazing to wonder what would have happened to Meeke had he not retired from a rally and propped up the hotel bar instead.