In the Rally Sweden service park, M-Sport Ford team principal Rich Millener said the following:
“There’s no doubt he has the speed, but I think there’s a bit of work we can still do on racecraft and learning that you just don’t give up.”
Four weeks later at Safari Rally Kenya, the subject matter was different but Millener’s statement was remarkably similar:
“We said there would be lessons to learn and I think the racecraft element is still something that’s there.”
In Sweden, he was talking about Mãrtiņš Sesks. In Kenya, it was Jon Armstrong.
Armstrong’s start to life with M-Sport in the World Rally Championship has blown many away, including the team itself. Millener has talked repeatedly of how impressed he’s been with the 31-year-old.
“His approach in general is fantastic,” Millener told DirtFish in Kenya. “The only downside is he’s wrecking every pair of overalls I’ve bought him!”
But a driver just three events into their Rally1 career is never going to be the finished article. Experience will round Armstrong into a more complete package, but that doesn’t just mean knowledge of the Ford Puma Rally1 or even the events, but how to tackle those events and react when things go wrong.
The best example is from the Safari, where Armstrong and co-driver Shane Byrne stopped six kilometers from the end of Soysambu 2 with a water pressure alarm.
While a sensible decision in nature, the crew were stationary for 20 minutes as they attempted to contact the M-Sport team back in Naivasha. The issue was phone reception was poor, so this proved an ineffective use of time.
“He’s learning the car and this rally has been very difficult to understand what’s going on with the car,” said Millener.
Armstrong has been a revelation so far in 2026, but isn't yet the finished article
“They got an alarm – and I can’t disagree with their philosophy and the way they did it. They got an alarm about water pressure, about oil pressure and pulled over and stopped; which is ultimately, bottom line, the safest thing to do.
“I think what we have seen over the past couple of days is the mud getting in the radiators and in amongst it and causing all sorts of cooling problems. In hindsight for them maybe they could have knocked it out of stage mode, see if it cooled down a little bit, carried on, modulated it, managed it.
“But at the same time you’ve got to learn that and I’m certainly not going to say they did anything wrong for stopping and checking and obviously sadly with the time we lost yesterday really we’re not losing huge amounts more [positions]. There was a lot of Rally2s in front of us that we were never going to catch so we haven’t lost anything more by dropping another 20 minutes and we’ve got a car that’s still working.
“They phoned us, we talked it through but again it’s just great lessons for them to realize how difficult it is to get the information from the team mid-stage because we’ve got very little information, the radio wasn’t working, the phone was a bit temperamental. And you know now we can use this as learning after the event, to have a debrief with them and show them, ‘Rght this is what we would have done as a team’.
“We’ve already had a quick chat, you have to think about the circumstances of the stage, you’ve suddenly got this alarm, have I hit anything in the last kilometer? No. Have I been through a massive water splash that could be affecting something? Yes I was, so maybe I’ve damaged a radiator or maybe I’ve been through a muddy section and got mud [somewhere]. You kind of need to calculate it all, so we can tell you ‘Yeah there’s alarms and this would be a procedure’ but you also have to apply that knowledge to conditions of the stage, so it’s not something you learn overnight.
Millener says Armstrong will improve his racecraft over time
“But these are the bits that’s going to be hard for them this year because concentrate on the driving and doing all that, if you have an event-free rally it’s very good and that’s kind of what they had in Monte and Sweden, no real issues. And here is the ultimate test, and I think it goes to show a lot of areas they know now they can learn from and proactively try to improve as we go forward.”
M-Sport frequently finds itself developing drivers and helping them grow to the best versions of themselves, so this teaching process is nothing new to Millener or the team.
“I’ve done it for 20 years now and have seen many different ways, and you’ve seen the best of the best in terms of your Sébs and your Otts who are very mechanically minded and know, ‘I can try this’, get it down and carry on,” Millener added.
“As we’ve just said, you know, if you modulate the temperature and it works, you may have dropped 20, 30 seconds, and on a rally like this, that’s nothing. You stop and drop 20 minutes, then you’re out.
It doesn’t matter because of the position from the day before. But again, it’s one to learn.”
Armstrong’s learning process continues this week, as he spends time working as a mechanic – as well as driving – during the team’s pre-event test for Croatia Rally (April 9-12).
