Slightly leftfield question for a Friday morning, but how familiar are you with the potter’s wheel? Sébastien Ogier is probably more familiar than he thinks he is.
Let me take you back to Paraguay, to Misión Jesuítica Trinidad. The second pass. On the final day of August last year.
Ogier’s Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 was out front by 39 seconds, but the Frenchman had his eyes on a bigger prize and to land title number nine, he knew he needed big Sunday points as well as the event win. What happened? The heavens opened.
And Séb was seething.
And so, to pottery.
The potter’s wheel is a platform which spins, allowing all sorts of pottery to be crafted. The two key components? Clay and water.
A lump of clay rotates and you shape it with your hands. When it gets too tacky and difficult to manipulate, that’s when the water comes in. Add water and two things happen: it becomes friction-free and it cools down.
What’s the one consistent description of this week’s Rally del Paraguay roads? Clay-like. And what’s the consistent forecast for Saturday and Sunday? Rain. Water. And lots of it.
Hankook’s Dynapro R213W WRC7(1) – or the soft, as it’s more commonly known – is going to have its work cut out generating heat and shifting the mud-water-clay combo which will combine to pack out the tread pattern.
Much as last year’s rain frustrated Ogier, it arguably cost his countryman Adrien Fourmaux more as he slipped off the podium from a potential to second to a likely fourth which became a retirement with a gearbox fault. The Hyundai man is well aware of what the weekend could bring.
“The rain,” he told DirtFish, “will change the game. Already on the dry, there is many difficult places. In the wet, it’s very, very hard.
“I prefer to don’t think about, we’ll see where we are.”
Then I put a snorkel on my face.Oliver Solberg
Hyundai’s sporting director Andrew Wheatley admits the i20 N Rally1 is not at its absolute best on the WRC’s equivalent of a potter’s wheel.
“We know that last year it was very tricky,” said Wheatley. “Even when Sébastien [Ogier] got the worst of the conditions for one run, you saw the time instantly fell away. The red earth is similar to other places that we go to, like in Kenya, when you go to Kenya, you know we really struggled in Kenya this year – on the first stage we lost two minutes and 15 seconds and Adrien lost the rally by 25 seconds. So, it can change the whole course of the weekend very quickly, but, hopefully, we’ll get a day and a half of dry and then we’ll worry about the situation when we get to it.”
Toyota driver Oliver Solberg’s his seen the forecast and offered the grim prediction: “It’s going to be a lot [of rain] I think. Friday? Just have a good, clean rally and then on Saturday and Sunday it’s a new rally completely. Then I put a snorkel on my face…”
Paraguay's increasingly famous red, clay-like roads will take on a certain Teflon-feel if the rain does come at the weekend
Which roads are going to be the worst affected by rain? Club DirtFish has all the answers, courtesy of our Recce Report which details (and shows) every meter of every stage.
Which stage, for example, is described as “Very boring in the dry, but when it rains…” and then there’s the place where: “With rain, it can be a disaster.”
Join us at Club DirtFish for the Paraguayan lowdown, as well as exclusive analysis, news, comment and entertainment from around the sport.
