From the outside, you might have been forgiven for wondering what the fuss was all about. By lunchtime on the first day of the 2004 World Rally Championship season, Marcus Grönholm had won two of the four stages and led the Monte Carlo Rally by 10 seconds from Sébastien Loeb.
Peugeot’s 307 CCWRC couldn’t be all bad, could it?
Actually, yes.
Grönholm won, then didn’t win, in Cyprus and had to wait until his home event in Finland to give the 307 its maiden success. And, let’s face it, Grönholm had the pace and commitment to put a wheelbarrow in contention on the roads around Jyväskylä in the mid-noughties.
After largely dominating the top of the millennium with a hat-trick of manufacturer titles from 2000-2002 and the drivers’ crown for Grönholm in two out of three seasons, the 206 WRC had established Peugeot as a genuine force in the sport. That was expected to continue with the car’s successor… until the 307 WRC was revealed.
Talking in his exclusive Club DirtFish column Ay, ay, ay, Grönholm recalled: “When I first saw the 307… ay… it was a test car. It was all black, and, well, it did not look so fantastic. But still, you want to believe everything will be OK.
“Then mid-way through 2003, we began to test the car. That’s when all of the s*** started.”
In typically forthright fashion, the Finn talks through two tricky seasons with the 307 CC WRC, investigating and dissecting the issues which left him with just three wins from 2004 and Peugeot’s final year as a factory team, 2005.
You’ll read how Grönholm was summoned to Peugeot’s Paris HQ to explain himself and why the team’s sporting director Jean-Pierre Nicolas was forced to call his wife…
