It’s fair to assume Sébastien Ogier isn’t listening to House of Pain in the week following his seventh World Rally Championship crown.
Winning last week’s Rally Monza was a great result and a great moment for Toyota’s French megastar, but as he told DirtFish before the start of the WRC’s Italian finale, his seventh title success in eight years isn’t one that’s going to have him shouting from the rooftops.
He’s definitely not jumping around.
From the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Ogier has shown great concern about competing at a time when the world is facing a wider crisis and that’s why he accepts his latest title with humility.
“Of course I am happy,” said Ogier, “but I don’t jump in the air. It’s not the time for that, I think the whole world is in a difficult situation, a lot of people are suffering at the moment so I have to be decent, you know.
“I enjoy that we’ve done our job pretty well, but I hope that soon we will be able to celebrate more. With Julien [Ingrassia, co-driver] we’ve been quite happy with the performance we’ve had. Of course, one of the bad turns was Rally Turkey for us, where we lost the championship lead.
“After that, not knowing how many events were remaining, it was never going to be an easy challenge to come back. We just said that we came here with this 14-point disadvantage knowing that the only chance we had was to put maximum pressure on Elfyn [Evans] and try to win the rally and force him to score big points if he wanted to remain in the lead.”
Similarly, the nature of his victory, coming after the demise of his team-mate Evans and the hope that Toyota could relieve Hyundai of the manufacturers’ title meant his feet would be remaining firmly on planet earth.
“At the end,” Ogier added, “it turned out to work well for us, but once again I didn’t jump in the air because it was my team-mate off the road and at this moment we kind of lost as well the manufacturers’ title, so it was…I couldn’t really enjoy it.
“Personally, I am very happy and I’m very happy for the team – we worked really well and we worked hard for this together this year.”
