Sébastien Ogier has been there. He’s seen it. Done it. And won it nine times. Mid-way through his 212thWorld Rally Championship start – 69 of which he’s won – he’s not in the mood for pulling punches.
A left-rear puncture and a time 1.7 seconds per mile slower than his team-mate Oliver Solberg was not the result he’d been looking for from Friday morning’s Rally del Paraguay opener. There would, no doubt, have been a few folk in the Encarnación service park grateful he didn’t have time to stop and chat at the end of Cambyreta.
One stage later and his rally was effectively run. The disgruntled Frenchman, further irked by an electrical issue with his car, was too quick over a crest, ran wide and hit the bank, fatally wounding the left-front suspension aboard his Toyota GR Yaris Rally1. He fixed it with a spanner, but the fix failed seven miles into SS3.
DirtFish arrived on the scene just as the helicopter was lifting the Frenchman up and away from the side of the stage.
Ogier's title defence took yet another turn for the worse with a broken front-left wishbone – amping up the frustration levels
Saturday’s lunchtime service offered an opportunity to catch up on what had been an opening day plagued by punctures and delaminations for the Hankook-tired Rally1 field. The immediate fury Ogier would likely have unleashed at the end of SS1 was replaced by a more considered response.
Asked what he thought Hankook should do about the situation, Ogier told DirtFish: “I think, especially when you’re the only supplier in a championship, I think you need to focus on the reliability and not the performance.
“I mean, the performance is nowhere anyway, but at least I don’t care about that. We all have the same. But the first step right now is simple. These new tires we got since Portugal is a clear step backwards. So at first, put the old [tire] back and also immediately start working on making a better product. That’s it. It’s pretty simple.”
Ogier’s frustrations with the tires used in the WRC is not limited to Hankook, he was similarly critical of Pirelli through the Italian firm’s tenure as the series’ sole supplier.
Ogier has made his displeasure for the current WRC tires known several times previously - now others are starting to chime in with concerns after Friday's spate of issues
Talking specifically about the Friday issues, Ogier added: “It’s far from acceptable, the situation we are in. There was massive issues for many, many drivers on every rally. Starting from Portugal, for me, losing a win, which was hard-fought, unfortunately. And this weekend, yesterday, it’s a pure joke.”
“Maybe I was one of the first being very vocal about it, like always, but now I think everybody is having the same opinion and something needs to happen soon because that’s unacceptable.”
Hankook’s Steven Cho responded to Ogier’s call for reliability not performance, saying: “Threading that needle is where all the experience and all the technology goes into and that’s our job and that’s what we have to do. I wouldn’t say that where we are today is a result of going for performance, but I don’t think we’ve ever lost sight of the fact that the durability and all that is the most important piece – but still we have to find that compromise. And the feedback we got overwhelmingly last year from the drivers and the teams is that they’d like a little bit more performance.”
Cho added that he was willing to consider – with stakeholder collaboration – reverting to the older hard-compound Dynapro gravel tire.
