It’s become a running joke within the World Rally Championship service park. He’s the man who simply won’t retire.
The initial plan was to do so after 2017’s Rally Finland – a romantic touch given the 1000 Lakes was his first WRC event back in 1985. But hip trouble accelerated the plan to slot Seb Marshall into the car as early as Portugal instead.
Hayden Paddon losing his Hyundai drive for 2019 meant Marshall shifted to work with Kris Meeke and Toyota, and so John Kennard was back. Except a freak testing accident for Finland that destroyed the car, and the bushfires that cancelled Rally Australia, meant the top-flight return never happened.
Next month, it finally will.
At 66 years of age, and nine years since his last start, Kennard will be back in the big league alongside Paddon as a trio of Hyundai crews sharing the third car.
That must feel surreal?
Kennard's last top-flight WRC start was Rally Argentina, 2017
“Yeah, it does,” Kennard tells DirtFish. “And I mean, there’s a whole lot of trepidation as to whether you can get up to the job. But you know the relationship between Hayden and I is strong.
“So I guess it’s a wee bit like Hayden – I mean, he’s short of seat time, and he’s worried about that side of it. And it’s just the same for me going back into a WRC1 car. But we’re doing other things, and it’s all working. So why pull it apart just because I’m old?”
Kennard first worked with Paddon back in 2006. In that time they’ve started 167 rallies together and won countless championships including PWRC, the ERC, APRC, New Zealand and, this year, Australia.
Paddon has brought on young co-drivers in recent years, chiefly 21-year-old Jared Hudson, but Kennard’s experience is key when such a big challenge lies ahead.
He’ll be the oldest co-driver in the Rally1 field by 19 years in 2026, but what does that really matter?
“There’s a good ad on TV here at the moment that says you don’t stop doing things because you get old. You get old because you stop doing things,” Kennard smiles.
“And I mean, that’s kind of the whole scenario. I’m still active with the business and kind of feel that I’m probably just about fit enough and capable enough to get in the car.
“I mean the hip I had replaced, that was giving me a whole lot of grief when I retired the first time and I’ve had a hip replacement and it’s absolutely fantastic ever since, so why not?”
Never in doubt
Kennard admits to feeling some "trepidation", but never once considered not coming with Paddon to WRC
All jokes aside though, Kennard has retired before. So was there ever any doubt that he’d be the one to partner Paddon when this WRC comeback opportunity came to fruition?
“At the beginning of this year, end of last year, where Hayden was saying ‘Let’s do the Australian Championship’, and it’s closer to home, it would have been easy to put Jared in the car,” Kennard explains.
“But I ended up having to apologize to Jared and say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m going to do this because I just bloody enjoy it still! And that was kind of the whole thing that when I step away from it, I miss it incredibly. So you kind of go, ‘If I can do this, let’s go and do it.'”
Kennard knows from previous experience how difficult it is to give up the best seat in the house.
He holds no regrets about stepping aside in 2017 because the decision was made for the right reasons. But he now knows what it feels like to watch a driver he’s helped nurture, and become so close with, compete on the global stage while he’s stuck on the sidelines.
Kennard didn't enjoy stepping out from the co-driving seat
“There were a whole lot of things going on in the background,” Kennard remembers. “And I’d always said to Hayden that we’re going to reach a point at some stage where you outgrow me for whatever reason, be it experience, be it age, whatever.
“And it kind of got to that point where because of other things that were happening in the background, it was a good time to say to him, ‘Well, let’s just cut it here and see if that helps in your progression’. And it’s always been a thing that I’ve accepted would happen at some stage.
“[But when it happened], you knew straight away that there was a massive piece of your life that you were going to miss. And I mean, I spent that year kind of following him around and taking guests on events and what have you, and it helped a wee bit, but it probably at the same time made it worse because you were still there. But you weren’t.”
That being said, Kennard isn’t afraid to step aside if Paddon secures a longer term future in the WRC, and he feels he’s holding his driver back in any way.
That doesn’t appear particularly likely, though!
“The way I look at it now: if Hayden gets to a point where this is really working out and I can see any minus in me being there, then that’s a conversation that needs to be had to go with that,” Kennard says.
“If there’s somebody else that can fill the role and fill in some of the small holes that maybe I’ve got, and he looks as though he’s going to continue, then maybe there is a time there that you see yourself stepping out of it.
“But it’s going to be bloody hard,” he laughs. “I guess the comfort side of it is that we know one another so well, that all of the things that I know he does and he knows I do, and you don’t worry about them, you just get on and you don’t have to think going into an event, ‘Oh is this done, is this done, is this done’, because you each know the other and you know that you will have done that or he will have done it.
“So it’s all that side of it that somebody else needs to grow into, and it’s a hard place to be growing in WRC1.”
Paddon’s better than ever
Paddon and Kennard have three confirmed events with Hyundai next year – the first being January’s Monte Carlo Rally.
The objective is therefore very different to Paddon’s last spell, where he was trying to be world champion. This time, his mission is to help his team become world champion.
Kennard is aware of the adaptation that lies ahead, but believes his driver is performing better than he ever has done.
“I think he’s a more thoughtful driver,” he says. “His consideration, you can see in the championships we’ve done over the last few years, you don’t see him getting the pressure.
Paddon's a better driver than he ever has been, believes Kennard
“When you didn’t get a result in the past, it was always the end of the world sort of scenario. Whereas now, he’s very good at going, ‘That doesn’t matter, we don’t need to win that event’. You go to Sweden, in an ERC rally, and you would just love to push that extra little bit to compete with Oliver [Solberg].
“And it’s hard to accept that you’re going to get second, but you didn’t need to beat him. So why do you need to push that hard and beat him when you were achieving absolutely everything you needed to for the championship by beating everybody else in the championship sort of thing?
“So it’s that mindset that’s improved him, I think. As far as I’m concerned, he’s driving better probably because of that than he ever has. And it’s those scenarios where you’re in Monte Carlo and you’re on dry Tarmac and you come around the end of a bluff and it’s absolutely sheet ice everywhere.
“The mindset before was ‘I’ve got to go as fast as I can down this piece of really, really icy road on slicks because everybody else will be going faster than me’. And I think now the thought will be ‘just go as slow as you need to go to get to the end of that because we need to be there when you get off the ice.’
“It’s measured, and he has that sort of personality. And I guess the stuff he’s been doing with business and all of that side of things as well is just teaching him all the time. It’s just his life experience as well. It’s calculating and measuring what you need to do to achieve what you want and what the team wants.”
Paddon’s resilience has paid dividends too, simply to earn himself this chance.
“He’s never been a person to leave unfinished business, you know. If you start a job, you want to finish the job, do it properly. So, no matter what he said [about his WRC future], yeah, there’s always been the unfinished business side of it that you’ve got something to prove,” Kennard adds.
“There’s a very strong relationship with Hyundai New Zealand and that’s probably what’s kept him there because the strands have kind of fallen apart at various times with Hyundai Motorsport. You kind of feel that you’re not getting the support that he maybe deserves and it would have been easy to go, ‘I’ll walk away’.
“But he has a very strong relationship with Hyundai New Zealand that in New Zealand is probably irreplaceable. So that side of it, every single time we’ve looked at other opportunities, you had to sit there and think, ‘No, we can’t do this’ because it would affect so many people. It would affect his business, the people who work for him all of that side of it, not just he and I.
“And I mean, again, it’s a challenge thing. OK the two years in ERC, the car wasn’t the best of the group of cars that were there, but the amount of work that he does on trying to make those sort of things happen. In the background, it’s hard to believe some of the stuff that he does, I mean, building his own dampers and he’s got a damper dyno at home in his workshop because he couldn’t find people to do it. So he’s carting dampers backwards and forwards to ERC events that he’d take home and build and try different scenarios and some worked, some didn’t.
“It was how he wanted and that was kind of part of what made things so good in ERC.”
What can truly be expected of Paddon in an i20 N Rally1 is hard to gauge at this stage, but one thing is for sure. This will be a far more fitting way for Kennard to sign off on his top-flight WRC career – if ever that day actually comes…
