Despite agreeing terms with Hyundai Motorsport, Christian Loriaux will continue to work at M-Sport, focusing on the company’s racing side for two weeks out of every month. For the other half of the time, he’s the Alzenau team’s engineering consultant.
The combination of Bentley scaling back its racing involvement and the stellar job M-Sport’s head of rally engineering Chris Williams has done with the 2017 Ford Fiesta WRC meant Loriaux wasn’t as busy as he would like to have been.
“Christian’s not the sort of person who’s going to sit around – he needs to be active,” M-Sport managing director Malcolm Wilson told DirtFish.
“Since we started working with Bentley in 2013, he’s been 100% on the race cars. And he’ll continue to work with us on that. We’re providing all the technical support and spares packages for the race teams out there running Bentley GT3s.
“But credit to Chris [Williams] and the incredible job he did to deliver a 2017 car which won back-to-back world titles out of the box. Chris remains very much at the head of our rally design and engineering operation.
“There’s no question about us going on working with Christian – he’s part of the family here and has been for 20 years. He and I have an incredible relationship and long may that continue.”
M-Sport’s race and rally programs are well spaced within the British firm’s recently developed, multi-million-pound Evaluation Centre.
It’s testament to the facility’s secret development capability that Wilson is happy for Loriaux to spend half of his time at Dovenby Hall without gaining any intelligence on how Ford’s 2022 Rally1 car is progressing.
