Every time Sébastien Ogier has had half a chance to win a World Rally Championship, he’s done so. Except in 2019.
Ignore 2009-11, when he was the inexperienced junior in a Citroën World Rally Championship stable ruled by Sébastien Loeb. No one expected him to be champion then. Definitely ignore 2012, when he wasn’t even in a World Rally Car.
But from 2013-18, he was unstoppable – not even knocked off his stride by his dominant team Volkswagen abruptly quitting. A quick switch to an M-Sport Ford, and the championship conveyor belt didn’t miss a beat.
In 2019, he was defeated. And defeated despite leaving the happy home he’d formed at M-Sport for the full-factory Citroën squad he thought would’ve given him a better chance of stretching that title run.
Even before 2019, Ogier had made clear 2020 would be his WRC farewell. And for a man synonymous with winning, leaving the championship as a loser would be untenable.
Given Citroën’s role in Ogier’s initial rise, there was a lovely romance to his decision to return there in a deal that had appeared set to take him to the end of his WRC career.
But that first Citroën stint had gone sour amid tensions with Loeb and with team management, and Citroën’s extremely bumpy 2017/18 seasons were a warning flag that even Ogier’s January 2019 Monte win couldn’t remove.
The periods of 2019 when Ogier looked a genuine title contender were more down to his tenacity and the stumbles of Ott Tänak and Thierry Neuville, Toyota and Hyundai, than the C3 being a truly title-worthy piece of machinery.
After Ogier grimaced his way uncompetitively through Rally Germany – an event he’d won three times in six years – crunch talks were held. Citroën had to prove it really could turn things around for 2020 or Ogier would be off, and he wasn’t going to be shy about looking around.
Two months later, Ogier still wasn’t convinced by Citroën and the most appealing alternative of all was about to become available.
Six-time champion Ogier in the fastest car in the service park, with his main rival in a team still chasing its maiden drivers’ title - surely that makes Ogier championship favourite?
The three-week period from the first firm news that soon-to-be-champion Tänak was prepared to walk away from Toyota to join Hyundai to confirmation that Ogier would be walking away from Citroën to step into his good friend’s vacated Yaris seat was perhaps the wildest ‘silly season’ period in WRC history – crazier still than the aftermath of VW’s sudden exit in late 2016.
That storyline only had 1.5 bombshells (VW quitting, Ogier picking M-Sport over his factory suitors). This time they just kept coming: Tänak willing to ditch Toyota on the very weekend he became world champion, Ogier immediately in contention to replace him, and then Citroën sensationally deciding to quit the WRC altogether – and laying the blame for its departure firmly on Ogier’s decision to leave… before he’d even publicly admitted he was leaving.
Oh, and in the middle of that, Ogier’s wife slating Citroën on social media.
They were extraordinary days.
But now the dust has settled, and Ogier will spend his final WRC season as a Toyota driver.
So will he retire as champion again?
He’ll certainly have a car fast enough for that task. A winner on only its second WRC event back in 2017, the Yaris has been the outright benchmark for raw pace for most of the past two seasons and Tanak was ultimately a pretty comfortable champion with it in ’19. Ogier’s got Elfyn Evans alongside him again and they were a very effective pairing at M-Sport.
Tänak’s new employer Hyundai hasn’t proved itself capable of taking a driver to the world championship yet and he’s got to settle into new surroundings.
Six-time champion Ogier in the fastest car in the service park, with his main rival in a team still chasing its maiden drivers’ title – surely that makes Ogier championship favourite?
But then consider the reasons why Tänak isn’t a Toyota driver anymore.
The Yaris proved too fragile too often during his time there. That stopped Tänak winning the 2018 title despite his devastating stats (fastest on 70 stages that season – 30 more than anyone else), and it made winning the ’19 title harder work than it should’ve been. The agonizing final-stage power steering problem that cost him victory in Sardinia was the blow Tänak just couldn’t forget.
Tänak had enough of a cushion to endure those frustrations and still win the title because Ogier’s Citroën wasn’t fast enough to pick up the pieces.
But what if Tänak gels with the Hyundai? The hint from his first test was that he emphatically had.
What if Hyundai has sorted the rough edges that have stopped its drivers winning the last three championships? Its 2019 manufacturers’ crown was a sign it potentially had and now it just needed a driver who could deliver season-long, a proven champion perhaps…
In other words, the Ogier/Toyota combination has a tougher opponent than the Tanak/Toyota combination did last season. There will be no room for flaws.
And then consider the other factor in Tänak’s Toyota exit: the decline of his relationship with legendary team boss Tommi Makinen. Ogier and Makinen under the same roof is another combination of very strong personalities to say the least. Ogier may describe 1996-99 champion Makinen as his “childhood idol” but that doesn’t mean he’ll give him an easier ride than he gave Citroën chiefs when things weren’t right.
For most of the 2010s, you felt that whichever team Ogier joined was guaranteed the championship. Tänak’s rise means that’s no longer the case.
Ogier will only have a brief early cameo role in the WRC’s 2020s. We’re about to find out if that cameo goes down in history as a sad story of the once-unbeatable champion departing deposed, or a fairytale final roll of the dice that might set the scene for his greatest achievement yet.
