Grégoire Munster is confident he’s worthy of retaining his World Rally Championship seat with M-Sport in 2025.
Munster was elevated from the WRC2 program into a Puma Rally1 for 2024, having started two events in the top-class car (Chile and Central Europe) the previous season.
The plan was for the 25-year-old to build his pace throughout the season and, although he suffered a difficult start with a few small offs, he ended the year strongly with back-to-back fifth places in CER and Japan – where he almost claimed his first WRC stage win.
“Yeah, I think at the end of the season, we were much better than in the first part of the season,” Munster told DirtFish. “But like you say, we’re also here [in Rally1]. We need to deliver. We need to show.
“We are young and fighting against much more experienced drivers and sometimes you do a bit too much, do some mistakes and the problem is you carry that bad momentum forward and you try to get out of it, but then you’re not feeling perfectly relieved when you’re driving and so on. So it’s not easy but I think we managed to turn things around at the end of the season.”
M-Sport’s 2025 driver lineup is yet to be confirmed having lost Adrien Fourmaux to Hyundai.
Munster’s deal to retain his seat is however thought to be something of a formality.
“This you need to ask Richard [Millener] or Malcolm [Wilson],” Munster said in Japan.
“But yeah, I think for sure the end of the season is going to help our case. Now I don’t know what the strategy is. I don’t know what funding the team has, from the higher ups.
“So I just [have my] finger crossed we’ve done our best. And I’m going to have some talks with them and [will be] trying to persuade them.”
Jourdan Serderidis has been impressed by Munster's progression
Munster’s backer, Jourdan Serderidis, believes Munster has shown enough in 2024 to deserve another chance in 2025.
Serderidis told DirtFish: “I don’t know the expectation from the people in general, but even though Thierry Neuville is world champion, he got so many criticisms from all the world.
“At any moment he made a mistake, the opinion of certain people was that Grégoire should be… he’s not fast enough, he should be top three. No, indeed he’s progressing and he’s closing the gap, rally by rally, having very few big mistakes, no major ones at high speed, and still it’s between 0.5 and one second per kilometer against drivers with much more experience like Thierry, Kalle, Ogier, Evans and these guys. So you cannot be so close after one year.
“In terms of progression, this year has been quite impressive. And I believe that he succeeded in the ability to prove that he can be a professional in that domain.”
