It’s Saturday night in Umeå and the television screens in the Rally Sweden service park are showing pictures no one at M-Sport wanted to see: Grégoire Munster’s Ford Puma Rally1 has gone straight on into a snowbank.
A whole 15 minutes go by and finally, Munster can dig himself out of the snow and crawl to the finish. But his Puma looks battered and bruised.
It’s going to be a hectic 45-minute service for the M-Sport mechanics – including Hayley Harrod.
“Rallying’s just that little bit different from everything else. It’s a faster pace, there’s always something different; no two services are ever going to be the same,” Harrod told DirtFish.
“If you’ve got something that happens, like we had an accident yesterday – managed to finish the stage – but it was a big bodywork repair job in a 45-minute service.”
“We didn’t super rally which is good, so we didn’t have four hours to fix the car. But it was still a very big job for what we had to do. It’s just exciting: there’s always something new, something different.”
Sunday’s 15-minute service was much more civilized, with both cars arriving back and base unharmed. So DirtFish brought the cameras along and mic’d up Harrod to get a proper, first-hand look at a WRC service.
Watch the whole thing below – and hear more from Harrod on her journey to becoming a WRC mechanic and working for M-Sport.
