This year’s Monte Carlo Rally was not the first visit to Monaco for either Josh McErlean or this writer. We both had a feel for what the rally was about, what the roads were like and in broad terms, what to expect.
But neither of us had mingled inside the walls of the famous casino while surrounded in every direction by the world’s best rally drivers. Sat near the grand piano, Elfyn Evans and Ott Tänak were having a chat. Adrien Fourmaux was near the window that overlooks the F1 circuit’s Massenet turn, speaking to French-language media. Kalle Rovanperä was in the main atrium having photos taken.
Standing at the bar with a coffee was McErlean. He, like I, was in awe of what surrounded us. That I was even able to spend a solid 15 minutes chatting to him about the season ahead was testament to our situation: McErlean was the new arrival to rallying’s elite, so didn’t have a queue of people hoping to be the center of his attention as say, Monsieur Ogier may do.
For years we would both have wondered (independently of one another) what it would be like to stand there. To be part of the World Rally Championship’s inner sanctum. Even if you’ve been involved in rallying for years, sometimes you wonder upon arrival: how on earth did I manage to get here? Can I do enough to prove I belong in this room, with this illustrious company?
Similar thoughts had crossed McErlean’s mind. Running among the Rally2 frontrunners on raw pace and then crashing out on the final day of Rally Islas Canarias did not help quell such ruminations.
Rally Portugal finally banished those thoughts. McErlean was the fastest Ford Puma driver by 45.2 seconds over senior team-mate Grégoire Munster. He also had the measure of Mārtiņš Sesks, who’d grabbed the biggest headlines of any M-Sport driver last season for his heroics in Poland and Latvia.
You look at it yourself and wonder sometimes whether you belongJosh McErlean
“Everyone doesn’t expect so much of you coming in as an underdog… Maybe you don’t deserve to be here or something,” McErlean told DirtFish after finishing eighth in Portugal.
“This weekend it’s been nice to show that speed. Same car, same package. Everything’s pretty similar in setup. So, it’s good to step up to that mark.
“It gives me a lot of confidence going forward because you look at it yourself and wonder sometimes whether you belong here or not. So that’s a good confidence boost.”
When he next takes a sip of fine Italian coffee just over a week from now in Sardinia, the emotions stirring within him will be slightly different. Step one on his journey to becoming a bona fide Rally1 driver is finally done. Now begins the next, tougher step: figuring out how to transform a solid baseline into reducing the pace deficit to the world champions driving Toyotas and Hyundais.
“They are elite,” said McErlean of his competition. “And you see the stage times Tänak has done [in Portugal] and the conditions they’ve been through.
Puma Rally1 withstood Portugal's rough terrain and allowed McErlean to push
“There’s a lot of commitment there and there’s a big step to that point but we have to learn, we have to take it rally by rally, stage by stage and keep on progressing.”
One of his next learning points to work on in Italy will be trusting the car. Rally2 cars require plenty of mechanical sympathy to get them through rough rallies. Worries about whether the car could handle the beating of rough gravel rattled loudly in McErlean’s head. But Portugal taught him that in Rally1 machinery he could push on.
Furthermore, as Elfyn Evans’ struggles in Portugal demonstrated, a bad first day continues to negatively affect your rally into the rest of the event. So in Sardinia, McErlean plans to push from the start.
“Road cleaning is another big thing there,” said McErlean. “If we can get some more performance on Friday, hopefully our road position into Saturday and Sunday would be good, but we take small bites at a time.”
