Mārtiņš Sesks’ pace and potential are abundantly obvious. He showed it again at the recent Rally Sweden, where he claimed M-Sport’s first stage win of the World Rally Championship season.
But equally, Rally Sweden further exposed an area M-Sport team principal Richard Millener feels Sesks can improve.
His race craft.
M-Sport was quick to confess it got its tire pressures wrong for the first morning in Umeå. Sesks was the most affected, as three punctures in two stages (with just one spare) left him in serious trouble with WRC regulations requiring each Rally1 car to have all four wheels and tires freely rotating on liaison sections.
Sesks, however, managed to complete the loop and drive back to service, but wasn’t able to tackle the afternoon loop as he’d preserved a tire using a method that is not permitted.
Sesks is undeniably fast, but he's not the perfect driver quite yet
And while he impressed everyone in Saudi Arabia to win five stages and lead the rally into the final day, M-Sport felt Sesks let his head drop after the first puncture too.
Millener told DirtFish: “There’s no doubt he has the speed, but I think there’s a bit of work we can still do on race craft and learning that you just don’t give up. We saw it in Saudi that when the disappointment comes from something happening, the head drops quite quickly.
“But I know that. I understand completely why. But you have to just be on it all the time to the very, very end because you never know what’s going to happen. Shortly after he had the puncture, Taka [Katsuta] rolled in Saudi. You just don’t know what’s going on.
“Maybe you could have ended up in a podium. Maybe you wouldn’t have got the second puncture because you relaxed a little bit so you weren’t concentrating as much. Maybe this, maybe that, you don’t know.
“But what I do know is you can still work to the absolute limit until you can do it no longer. And I think there’s a couple of bits to do there. But again, to bounce back on Saturday morning and set a fastest stage time just goes to prove a lot of other things as well.”
M-Sport’s task is therefore to work with Sesks and ensure his performances are more consistent, but how does it do that?
“It’s time in the car, it’s number of events, and that’s why we push so hard to try and do, minimum, the same as what we did last year,” Millener said.
“A lot of people say he needs to do full season or needs to prove himself on Tarmac – yes, we agree to all of it, but the constraints we have in the budget we have available, doing the same events as last year that are going to have the most chance of repeated stages [made the most sense].
“You’ve got to set a pace, as we saw in Greece last year after speaking to him he knew his pacenotes were nowhere near as good as they needed to be for technical stuff. The fast stuff there is no issue, no commitment issues, no notes issues and he’s clear – and Saudi was a very fast rally as well when you look at it.
Rallies like Finland, Estonia and Sweden Sesks has proven himself, but not on the more technical events
“But as soon as we get into the more technical rallies he was struggling last year, and it ended up with average performances or performances of what I would expect from someone that’s learning their way through Rally1.
“But we’ve got to tweak that dial up a little bit now and see a bit more improvement on those rallies, because there’s certain ones where we know Finland, Estonia, we know he’ll be good. But the other ones, and that’s what goes back to what I was saying earlier, the race craft and everything.
“The whole thing needs to be perfect, otherwise you simply won’t be on the podium. You can’t ignore any of it because if you are, somebody else won’t be.”
Sesks will return to M-Sport and the WRC at Rally Portugal (May 7-10), skipping the upcoming trips to Kenya, Croatia and Gran Canaria.
