How the WRC’s easy target turned heads and changed minds

It’s amazing how perceptions can change.

Gus Greensmith has gone from a berated World Rally Championship driver, that few truly respected, to one that’s rapidly reconsidered opinion following an impressive display on last weekend’s Monte Carlo Rally.

That moment of joy last Friday when WRC’s All Live feed cut to him driving away from the end of SS7 having just found out he’d won his first ever WRC stage has instantly become a classic moment of WRC TV. Not only that, but it reaped deserved praise and admiration.

The fact he did it on the Monte Carlo was particularly poignant given just how much he’d struggled there 12 months earlier.

It genuinely is worth a refresher of how dismal that 2021 Monte Carlo Rally was for Greensmith in order to fully appreciate how remarkable his 2022 event was by comparison.

M-Sport hadn’t done a pre-event test, but the Fiesta WRC was still competitive – as proved by Teemu Suninen in the first few splits of SS1 before he chucked it off the road.

But Greensmith never got anywhere near the pace. His result of eighth overall doesn’t sound so bad in isolation, but when you consider he finished over eight minutes adrift of the rally winner – and 57.5s behind Andreas Mikkelsen’s Rally2 Škoda Fabia on merit – it’s little wonder Greensmith labeled this as “the worst performance of my career to date.”

And don’t forget, there was the 2020 Monte to consider in Greensmith’s collection of poor showings too, where he embarrassingly slid off the road when simply trying to turn his car out of a spin on an icy section of stage.

But this year? His tone and demeanor was far more positive – and rightly so. Fifth place is a new personal best for Greensmith on asphalt. The stage win was one thing, but Greensmith could easily have finished on the podium had his Puma Rally1 not suffered an engine problem – and a puncture – on Saturday.

“Looking at where we were this time last year to where we are now, I think it’s a fairly dramatic step,” Greensmith told DirtFish.

And just to illustrate the point, here’s a comparison of Greensmith’s pace on the Monte Carlo Rally in 2021 and 2022.

It’s extremely clear proof of how far he has come. Of course, it can rightfully be argued that Greensmith would be hard-pressed to perform worse than he did in 2021, but to be more than twice as quick on an event in the space of one year is impressive.

While it’s not an exact science to change one variable and assume all others remain the same, if you eject Greensmith’s SS10 from his 2022 figure – where he picked up his puncture and the engine problem – then it drops all the way down to 11.2s.

“I would say the car certainly gives me a lot of confidence,” Greensmith offered when asked if something just clicked last weekend or if his progression was a more step-by-step process.

“The balance of the car is just something I’ve never experienced in anything else that I’ve driven and whatever I do it just makes me want to drive faster and it’s so predictable.

“But to be honest I’d also say last year I felt like I was on a very good level in places as well – not all the rallies but certainly a good amount of them – and I think it was just the fact the car hadn’t been developed for a few years and we knew all the resources had been put into this year.

“So obviously now, the first rally of the year [to have] won a stage, I certainly wouldn’t have been thinking about that this time last year!”

Greensmith’s pre-event expectation of himself was just to produce a “good, solid performance” with stage times “consistently in a good range” of one another. He managed to exceed it.

Naturally, team-mate Sébastien Loeb was quicker, but for Greensmith to be on pace with Adrien Fourmaux before the Frenchman binned it – a driver whose rallying roots were on roads like the Monte – and actually quicker than Craig Breen spoke volumes.

Breen wasn’t on an all-out attack as he bedded himself into his new environment, instructed to score solid points to kickstart his and M-Sport’s championships, but nor was Greensmith.

The Ford Puma Rally1 has proved to be as quick and refined out of the box as many had expected, but Greensmith now looks like a driver who fully deserves the opportunity to drive it.

Nobody would have been saying that 12 months ago.

“I don’t think we really could have asked for more,” said Greensmith of M-Sport’s collective performance.

“We’ve made a good little step forward this weekend, and we can look forward to the rest of the year.”

But the 25-year-old isn’t getting too excited. Sweden could well be a tough one for Greensmith on a surface he’s comparatively not overly familiar with, and with one pre-season goal already chalked off, the focus is now simply on achieving the next one.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said when asked if his result changes his targets.

“[A] podium is the next one, and realistically this weekend if we hadn’t had the engine issues we would have been fighting for the podium. So that’s good.

“Everything was good, everything was consistent. I made no mistakes, did what the team wanted me to do but I also did what I needed to do for myself.”

Greensmith isn’t the kind of character that allows the outside world to see any of his insecurities. But if last year’s Monte did leave any bruises – and it’s hard to believe that it didn’t – then they’ve more than healed now.