Elfyn Evans leads the World Rally Championship points for the first time after his second career victory on Rally Sweden last month.
The new Toyota man, who also led much of the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally before finishing third, is firmly in contention to become the first Briton to win the WRC title since the late Richard Burns in 2001.
DirtFish caught up with Evans to see if life is different now he’s at the top.
Q: How does it feel to wake us as the leader of the World Rally Championship? Have you been flinging the curtains back, beating your chest and shouting: “I’m on top of the world!”?
Elfyn Evans: No, David. No. I haven’t been doing any of that.
Q: Oh. Has anything changed?
EE: No. To be honest, I haven’t given it a thought. You think there’s going to be a bit of downtime between Sweden and Mexico, but the time just flies by. We did the test in Spain last week and, including the travel days, that takes four days out of the week. Once you’ve done the prep, watched the onboards and worked with the notes, done the training, it’s pretty much time to get on the plane again.
Q: Is Mexico a tough one?
EE: Physically it can be quite a challenge with the heat in the car and the thinner air, but we’ve done some good training, so I’m sure we’ll be fine. We’re out there a day earlier as well, we’ve got some PR stuff with Toyota in Mexico City before we head to the rally, so that’ll help us get over the jet-lag as well.
Q: Toyota hasn’t always been at its strongest in Mexico with some heat and altitude-related issues in the last three years.
EE: I believe we’re over that. The speed Ott [Tänak] showed last season when he pipped us to second place would bear that out.
Q: How much can you prepare the car for Mexico, the conditions with the altitude and heat are fairly specific…
EE: Last year we were making changes at shakedown to the car and there’s always going to be an element of that with this event.
Q: Is rain your only chance of winning?
EE: I wouldn’t say that, but rain would improve our chances tremendously. There’s always a chance it can rain – admittedly it’s a very, very small chance. And, to be honest, it would have to absolutely piss it down for ages to make a real change. It’s warm and in some sections really quite exposed and windy, the road dries quickly there.
The surface is quite ‘marbley’ and quite loose, yeah, it would need a lot of rain. I think the best thing Scott [Martin, co-driver] and I can do is just get our heads down and get on with it.
Q: Running order is talked about so much, is the heads-down approach the only one?
EE: For me it is. You can’t change it, so we’ll just forget it and get on with driving the road in front of us. It’s difficult to even do much preparation at the test. We had a couple of roads, but once you’ve been up and down those roads a few times, you’ve swept the line and got more grip. Like I said, we’ll just get on with it.
Q: In practical terms what can you do to the car?
EE: Obviously we’ll soften the car to try to find some more traction, but there’s only so much you can do – the conditions are changing and evolving a lot during the day.
Q: So, life’s all good for the leader of the world championship?
EE: It’s the same as it was before. Except there’s a bit more media to do and the phone’s ringing a bit more…
