World Rally Championship absentee Hayden Paddon has revealed fighting for his place in rallying has become “normal” to him, after a third attempt to return to the WRC failed this year.
Paddon had plotted a four-round campaign behind the wheel of a Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC, with essentially three warm-up events in Portugal, Sardinia in Finland before the big one: his home rally in New Zealand.
However the ongoing coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on that idea, which followed what Paddon believes was an unavoidable testing crash in Finland and the cancelation of Rally Australia in 2019; two events he had secured the funding to compete in.
When asked by DirtFish how he keeps his motivation up after so many setbacks, Paddon said: “I guess that’s one of the advantages of fighting your way in from New Zealand. My whole career has been like that, we’ve always been sort of against the odds.
“We’ve always had a good, close group of people around us and personally I’ve thrived on challenges, I’ve enjoyed it when it’s got tough and you know, coming from this side of the world it’s been a hell of a lot tougher than any European driver.
“We had to find our way financially, we had to work our way through the support categories and learn all brand new rallies from scratch that everyone else in Europe had sort of grown up around and learn different cultures and the different languages, just everything is completely different than back home at New Zealand.
“It’s just been part and parcel of life, when you’ve been doing it so long like that it just becomes normal. You don’t see it as bad or a challenge, you just work through it and try and find solutions.”
Paddon – who won a Pirelli Star Driver scholarship for the Asia Pacific region in 2010 before winning the Production WRC title in 2011 – became one of few WRC drivers from the southern hemisphere active in the series when he made his World Rally Car debut with M-Sport on Rally Spain 2013.
He thinks it would be good for the championship to have more cultures represented, but acknowledges that’s not what interests the manufacturers.
“I would have liked to think that [being from New Zealand] might have helped WRC,” he said.
“Obviously you’ve got [Takamoto] Katsuta from Japan at Toyota but other than him, before us the last non-European was Chris Atkinson. As a world championship, I think it’s good for the sport to have non-Europeans in there, but obviously from a team perspective that’s not what’s important.
“Teams want drivers who are going to get the results and everything. It has worked against us quite severely I think in the past, but hey, no regrets. I’m proud to be from New Zealand, it’s home for me and we made the best of the situation.”
