When Sébastien Ogier fired up his car to start his 200th World Rally Championship event, this wasn’t the morning he had in mind.
An inspired victory in Paraguay partially iced the most amazing cake – a cake Ogier’s been baking all year. And then Chile, stage one and he’s 9.2 seconds down on Kalle Rovanperä’s Pulpería benchmark. Worryingly, the Finn’s far from full of beans and reports his wasn’t a good run through the 12-miler.
Ogier, however, is shaking his head between flying finish and the stop line. It’s not right.
Fortunately, the eight-time world champion has seen most things before and he and co-driver Vincent Landais are immediately on it and effecting as much change as possible on their Toyota GR Yaris Rally1.
By stage three, he’s climbed from seventh to fourth.
“I was on the limit in there,” he smiled, thinly at the stop line. “I cannot be faster. We need to make some changes.”
By the time he’d arrived back in Concepción, 13.9 seconds down on leader Elfyn Evans, he had more detail for DirtFish.
“The confidence and the feeling with the car didn’t give me the chance to push more,” he said. “I was struggling and, in this condition, if you overdo it, it’s easy to do a mistake. It’s unfortunately a lot of time lost straight away. And, basically, the trend was there the whole loop.
“I was not really able to turn it around this morning with the car I had, even though I made some adjustments – the ones I could do a bit on the road section. The last stage felt a bit better in the cockpit and I was feeling that I was driving quite on the limit, but still not the speed we need to have.
“Luckily, there’s a service now and we can make a bigger change and we have some good option, I believe.”
Pausing philosophically, Ogier added: “You know, even after 200 starts, you can make it wrong.
“I had a different setup than my team-mates and this morning it didn’t work. Those roads are not easy, you know, tricky with this camber and if you’re not really having the perfect balance and grip you need to have, it can very quickly cost you time.
“It’s never big things, you know, but we don’t need big things to really disturb us. You know, we’re fighting with small details. We’re having a service now, we make some change, reset on myself and try to drive better this afternoon.”
As Ogier guided Yaris #17 towards its service bay, his competitors provided more context to what might have muddied the morning waters.
Ogier’s team-mate Sami Pajari offered: “It’s been a bit strange, in a way, to be like a Rally Chile… I think we never really saw that the guys from the front are doing so well and it feels a little bit like the line is quite messy when we are coming up from the back.”
Hyundai man Adrien Fourmaux agreed, adding: “I did expect quite a lot of sweeping, but actually, instead of going on the hard [surface], it was still digging some dirt from the road. And it was a lot of loose everywhere.
“Even sometimes on the straight, the car was slowing down because it was so soft. So it was really, really strange. Also in the cut, there was a lot of stones from the cars in front. There were many stones on some corners where I had to slow down. So it was really strange, quite different than what I expected.”
And, to add a little perspective, a fortnight ago, a little further north on the continent Ogier shipped 40 seconds with a puncture on the first morning. Then dominated for two and a half days and delivered another sublime win.
Another fightback win here could deliver the cherry for that iced cake.
