As Oliver Solberg thundered down the hill and through the field, the watching world held its collected breath. What about the fence?
The eventual Monte Carlo Rally winner’s decision to smash back onto the road (Kris Meeke in México style) might have seemed high risk. Actually it wasn’t, thanks to one man. Step forward Takamoto Katsuta.
Were it not for Katsuta’s Rally Japan assault on a bunch of roadside barriers, Solberg might well have missed out on his round one win.
Toyota technical director Tom Fowler puts the science behind the theory.
“I’m not sure any of the other cars could do an A-team-style burst through a fence like Oliver did and not destroy the cooling package,” he told DirtFish.
“Did I have the ultimate confidence that the car would be fine? No. I rarely have ultimate confidence – but it’s kind of an interesting story about how Oliver has to thank Takamoto. When Taka hit the plastic barriers and destroyed the cooling package in Japan, we talked in-depth about this in the debrief.
Katsuta's mistake in Japan actually had positive consequences for protecting a Toyota win two months later
“We came to the conclusion that, in WRC, they’re putting more and more fences everywhere, chicanes and speed control devices and protection on trees and so on – it’s more and more likely that something’s going to be in the road in front of you. Another aspect was talking to Sébastien [Ogier], who said that he came close to destroying his car’s [cooling package] on the bits Taka left in the road.
“We decided after that that we would err on the side of caution and make the grill mesh, the metal part, more like the version we’re using on gravel for Tarmac so that we can deflect these kind of objects. It was that metal mesh which pushed the fence post out of the way and stopped his radiator from getting pierced.
“It was a fairly incredible piece of thinking and driving from Oliver. Coming through that hedge like somebody bursting out of a hidden fence from the batcave was like something out of a cartoon. To be honest, the [Kris] Meeke moment in Mexico came to my mind as well. It was quite something…”
