There’s a new face in the Junior WRC this year whose name carries a bit of baggage. There’s a lot of son-of occurrences in the World Rally Championship, and it applies here too. Kimathi is a well-known surname in rally circles, especially in Africa.
But it’s not that name. Not the surname. It’s the other one. McRae. Yes, he’s named after the 1995 World Rally champion. And fair play to his father Phineas – he named his son a year before Colin McRae went on to win his only world title. That’s some solid forethought.
Carrying that name is probably a little unfortunate as he heads to Sweden. He’s not in a strong position to take the rallying world by storm at the first time of asking. He’s still got a lot of learning to do.
McRae Kimathi is one of the select few debutants in this year’s Junior WRC field. He’s up against reigning champion Sami Pajari and drivers who have already accrued stage miles on WRC events from years past like Jon Armstrong, Lauri Joona and Robert Virves.
Kimathi, meanwhile, has to compete on Rally Sweden this week after only seeing snow for the first time in his entire life last week while testing in Norway.
It had to be explained to him that the track he was testing on was a frozen lake and that it would melt in summer – he initially thought it was a permanent test course. And this will be his first time competing outside of Africa too. Suffice to say, he’s going in at the deep end.
But if you listen to some of his stories about how he got here, it’s clear he’s still living up to his given name in other ways.
“When I was younger, maybe 15 or 16, I crashed my father’s Subaru in the compound,” says Kimathi.
“Not an ideal start to my career. But thankfully I got away unscathed. It’s one of those memories you don’t really want to remember!”
Indeed, Kimathi had a bit of an inauspicious start to his rallying career. There was more enthusiasm than there was skill in the beginning – to the point that he’d initially inherited the very same nickname as the man he was named after.
“When I started, it was more of a McCrash career,” says Kimathi. “Of course, when you are young, you really want to drive so quickly but with little experience, so I crashed a lot in the beginning of my career. I took a break for six or seven months to get my head back right and get myself sorted.”
That he did. A couple of years spent in the Kenyan National Autocross Championship got his development back on track.
He was a late starter too – at least by WRC standards. Current top-level young guns Kalle Rovanperä were honing their craft from the moment their legs were long enough to reach a set of pedals. Esapekka Lappi won karting competitions in Finland as a teenager before moving into rallying.
Kimathi waited until he was 20 to get started and he arrives in Junior WRC already 27 years of age – the same age Colin McRae was when he took his only WRC title in 1995. Cultural differences have played their part in lengthening his journey from rally fan to rally driver – and he’s still holding down a day job as an accountant too.
“Quite honestly, I needed to finish school. My mother was so skeptical about me finishing school. She didn’t really think rallying could be a full-time job because where I come from, there’s no infrastructure to say ‘OK, I’m a professional rally driver, this is a job’. So you needed to finish school.
“That’s one of the main reasons I started quite late. Not late per se, in my part of the world, it’s not late at that age, it’s quite early. Most of us really need to finish school, go to university, get a degree and then start to do something else.
“That’s mainly the reason why I started late per se in your terms, but in our terms, it’s maybe the right time to start.”
That’s where the other familiar name comes in, though. Kimathi. In Phineas Kimathi, he has a father who’s not only driven in the WRC previously but is a successful businessman. He currently holds the post of both Safari Rally CEO and president of the Kenyan Motorsport Federation. That’s bound to help.
Motorsport dads can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be easy to get too involved and start dictating what their son or daughter does as they progress through their careers.
But with the Kimathis, a balance has been struck. Those connections built up over decades spent in the worlds of both business and rally have no doubt come in handy – but when it comes to getting behind the wheel, it’s all on McRae.
“He’s not the one that will come maybe to every service and pick every tyre choice for you – but he’s not the one who is going to leave you completely alone,” he explains.
“He’s done his rallying, that’s what he normally tells me. He has charted his own path, and he wants me to chart my own path and make my own decisions and mistakes. Time and time again, when I need some help in terms of sense of direction and path, I will reach out to him and ask him a few questions, and he is happy to guide me.
“He’s not going to be the dad that tells me ‘you should have hit the apex here, or you should have exited this corner like that’ no. He understands that he has his own driving style, I have my own driving style, so he’s more focused on making sure I have the right package to be competitive and I make sure I’m at the top.”
So, getting to the top. He’s got the tools now – a new-for-2022 Ford Fiesta Rally3 with a bigger restrictor for more power, compared to the Rally3 he drove in Africa last year, along with M-Sport engineers giving him data he couldn’t have imagined having access to during his privateer days.
What he needs is experience. And he’s been given a helping hand from plenty of experienced people in the lead-up to his Junior WRC debut.
John Haugland, who’s been running a winter rally school in Norway for almost three decades, showed him the ropes. So too did Craig Breen, a former pupil of Haugland’s from back in his WRC Academy days a decade earlier.
“When I sat with Craig, he’s a very smooth driver, he’s very fast. He just told me to stay away from the snowbanks and it will be OK,” said Kimathi of his passenger ride with Breen.
That said, it wasn’t all good news. Some of Breen’s advice was highly questionable.
“Craig has this weird way of making tea with milk [see above]. It was something…look, I’ve taken tea with milk but the way Craig does it is different. I asked him, why the hell would you put tea with milk – you need to taste the tea properly. But no, he’s like, put milk.
“It didn’t turn out to be a very good idea for me. The taste was horrible. I don’t know how he drinks that tea. I didn’t want to tell him so I just pretended to drink the tea, go back to the tent and pour it [out]!”
Kimathi driving like his namesake during his first time in the Junior WRC is probably not the best idea. Going full McRae without the requisite experience is unlikely to well – so Breen has probably delivered him the right advice.
For driving, anyway. Making tea, not so much.
