When you’re as obsessed with victory as Sébastien Ogier is, frustration is never far from the surface when you’re not winning.
It doesn’t matter that Toyota has won 16 of the last 18 World Rally Championship events, or that it maintained its 100% domination of the current generation of Safari Rally Kenya. To Ogier, at least.
The Frenchman didn’t win, and any opportunity to win was squashed by an issue he saw as being outside of his control.
What else, then, did we really expect him to say when the microphone was ushered towards him at the end of the powerstage?
“We have dominated as a team in recent times,” he said, “but this weekend was not a good one for us.”
Oliver Solberg was ejected from the lead with the same alternator issue on the road section out of SS13 – Sami Pajari is understood to have suffered the same problem, but found a solution to return to service – while Elfyn Evans stopped in the stage with broken rear-right suspension.
Ogier continued: “So maybe it’s a small kick in the a** for us to do better again.”
It’s fairly harsh feedback, considering Takamoto Katsuta still delivered a win for Toyota and both of the other teams suffered mechanical problems and failures too. But standards dropped in Ogier’s eyes, so he wanted to deliver a message.
“We were expecting at the beginning of the week, seeing the condition in recce, we knew it would be a tough challenge,” Ogier reasoned to DirtFish. “And I think we mentioned many, many times, the main thing will be to go through and there wasn’t any car going through without problems this weekend – everybody had a share of issues and some bigger, some smaller.
“Unfortunately for the three main cars of Toyota it was a big one, so yeah, that’s part of the game in Kenya. But still, I think [it was] not only the condition, I think we haven’t been at our best this weekend as a team.
“There were many things which could have been done better, and there’s an opportunity to discuss about it. And, you know, mistakes all happen in life. The important thing, if you want to be successful, is to don’t repeat it.
“So, yeah, analyzing that and be better for the future.”
Asked if Toyota could have been better prepared for Safari, Ogier replied “definitely” before adding this alternator problem was not brand-new.
He added: “I’ll say as a team, definitely you can say your engineers should have thought about it, but I should have thought about it maybe as well, you know. I also think that they had this issue last year, but OK the reality is more their part of the job than mine.
We win and we lose together.Sébastien Ogier
“But anyway we win and we lose together, so when I bring things it’s just to be constructive not to critique anybody – it’s just I’m tough on myself. I talk with my team, they know that already anyway.
“So it will not be a surprise if the debrief have some bit harsher word, but yeah, that’s the way you go forward in life sometimes. There are downs that you need to learn from and become even stronger.”
However, team-mate Evans didn’t think it was “entirely fair” to suggest Toyota was underprepared for Kenya.
“I think the team are always working very hard to achieve as much as we can to always improve,” he told DirtFish.
“Of course, many lessons to be learned from the weekend. I think, you know, part of the extreme conditions, all this water, definitely threw up a few issues. There’s no question about that.
“But I have no question that the team is still working hard.”
