Candidly, he points out: “I was only a small cog in the gearbox!”
But no gearbox can function without all of its cogs working in harmony. Unless it’s in Marcus Grönholm’s Peugeot 307 WRC of course…
Volkswagen needed Richard Browne, just as much as it needed every other member of its team. And as Browne tells DirtFish, recognizing that was a key part of VW’s unprecedented success story – not only the superb Polo R WRC it had created.
The story begins in Sardinia, 2011, where Volkswagen’s long-awaited announcement came that it would be joining the WRC in 2013. An announcement that would change the course of WRC history forever.
Rumors had been rife for months that it would be stopping its Dakar effort to focus on the WRC instead. Three wins in its final three attempts with the Touareg perhaps offered a clue about how VW did things, but could an all-new team really come into rallying and show the likes of Citroën how it’s done?
VW’s acquisition of a disgruntled Ogier was an important step in the right direction; the Frenchman’s confidence in the project was so high he was willing to sacrifice competing at the top level in 2012 just to drive a Polo R WRC.
Ogier sacrificed a season of top-class competition to drive for VW in 2013
Instead, he kept his hand in behind the wheel of a Škoda Fabia S2000 while Volkswagen conducted an intense testing program – crucially visiting events, and stages, the WRC had just visited to put the Polo through its paces.
Ogier clocking fastest time on the Polo’s very first stage was immediate justification; an unbeaten run of four drivers’ titles from 2013-16 (when VW pulled its program) and four manufacturers’ titles the ultimate result. Just eight of the rallies VW entered ended without a Polo on top.
Clearly, the car was great. As Kris Meeke puts it today: “Volkswagen rewrote the rulebook in terms of how you build a rally car.” But these numbers only tell part of the story. VW’s strengths ran deeper with a working culture that galvanized its entire effort.
This story takes us back to Sardinia 2011, where Browne – working for Prodrive as a customer engineer at the time – ran into an old friend: Gerard Jan de Jongh.
Jan de Jongh – who would later engineer Ogier to his four world titles with VW – had moved to Volkswagen to work with Nasser Al-Attiyah in Dakar, and ran into Browne in Sardinia.
“He said ‘Volkswagen’s a pretty good company to work for, you should send me your CV and if something ever comes up, your CV will be on file in HR,” Browne recalls.
Volkswagen was very well prepared for its maiden WRC campaign thanks to its testing efforts
“So I did that and forgot about it for two years, but he was true to his word. When an opportunity came up, my CV was there and I got a call from somebody saying, ‘Are you interested in working for Volkswagen?’
“This was an opportunity to be a factory engineer, so I jumped at it. I met the whole team in Sweden 2013 and got the job to be engineer for Andreas Mikkelsen.”
Hindsight reveals that to be the career move of a century, but Browne remembers the scepticism many had about Volkswagen’s credentials.
“Nobody could have really predicted it,” he says. “The teams and people with experience, people in Prodrive included, the opinion was these guys know Dakar but they’ll struggle in rally.
“No-one really knew at the beginning that they had built a team of a huge array of people. I think there were 24/25/26 nationalities, something like this, in that team and it was a huge amount of experience from all over.”
The raw ingredients were all there, but it’s making everything – and pertinently everyone – work in harmony that was the key to unlocking such sustained success, believes Browne.
“It was management light and all the key people, mechanics and engineers were there. It was very well structured and organized,” he explains.
“Jost Capito’s office was always open – not just figuratively but literally the door was always open. Same for Sven Smeets, same for F-X Demaison. The door was always left open; you could walk in at any time with any problem and they would always try to help you. It was a really, really good structure.
Volkswagen enjoyed a run of unprecedented success before it all ended in Australia, 2016
“People I think at the time thought the Volkswagen team was successful because of budget, and for sure you need money to do this and they did it right in the way they went testing for so long beforehand.
“But at the same point there were teams with more budget than us, I’m sure. For me, it was a lot about the key people and how the team was run.”
You need only examine the case of Hyundai in 2022 to understand how the working environment can affect results. Yes the i20 N Rally1 was underdeveloped, but a lack of leadership and pockets of disarray within the team only added to the problem.
At Volkswagen, the exact opposite scenario played out. Perhaps it sounds like corporate jargon, but the ‘working culture’ within Volkswagen’s WRC team really did make a difference.
“It was really, really good, and it comes from the top down, from Jost down,” Browne continues.
“That’s the way he is – he’s really good at building a team. And Sven Smeets, the sporting director at the time, was a really, really good people person.
“F-X is a strong character and strong leader, but you need that too for making decisions and to hear all the opinions in a meeting about why a part failed or whatever and make a decision about how to move forward.
“I get annoyed when people say the success was because of budget because it really wasn’t. It was really a lot to do with the people that were there. And at that time very, very few people moved from mechanics upwards, a lot of the people if you look through the pictures from ’13 to ’16, everyone stayed.
Volkswagen's success stretched far beyond the special stages
“Engineers stayed, mechanics stayed, all the key people stayed and all the people who weren’t in any pictures, design office, a lot of people stayed and there’s a good reason for that.
“It’s not the same with a lot of teams. You see a lot of turnover in a lot of teams because people are unhappy or don’t like the way things are done, their ideas are not heard or whatever.
“But it was not like that at Volkswagen. It’s a clear sign that everyone was happy with what was going on there.”
A happy workforce is a winning workforce. Literally. Naturally, VW’s ridiculously good form helped keep people onboard.
“Yeah but winning all the time means you get job offers,” Browne points out. “It’s not always like that either.
“It’s a good time if you’re only interested in moving up and making a step in your salary or in your career. It’s very easy to leave a successful team because another team wants to get some information.
“That’s always the case from F1 down, there’s always some poaching. And everyone probably got offers, including myself, but everyone stayed. For sure people liked winning, but F-X’s way to run the team was he would listen to mechanics and engineers, and the mechanics have to service the car and he would always listen to them about ‘why was this slow to change?’ or ‘why was this slow to service?’ or ‘what could we do to make it better?’.
Management understood what everyone in the team needed, says Browne
“And same with the engineers – we all came from different cars, different experiences and stuff and he was just always listening and that makes you feel a part of it then. If there’s a change and it’s a change for the better, and it’s something you’ve suggested, anyone can be happy and proud of that.
“And that makes the team stronger; it’s not just one person saying ‘my way or the highway’ which was definitely the case in some other teams and probably still is in some teams.
“It was just a really good culture, probably the best four years of Volkswagen Motorsport’s history and for sure the best years for a lot of us. It was a really enjoyable time, it was good to work with all of them.”
‘Them’ obviously includes Mikkelsen – a driver Browne witnessed grow into a World Rally winner. But more than that (are you sensing a theme here?), Browne rates Mikkelsen highly on a human level.
“It was really enjoyable to work also with Mikkelsen,” he says. “He’s one of those drivers who always gives something back to the crew and team behind him. Some drivers forget, some drivers just don’t even do it but it was really rewarding to work with him because you kind of felt part of a smaller team within a bigger team.
“Of course it was very difficult because Ogier was coming to the peak of his career in a car that he was driving for a year and a half before it ever entered in competition, and he was unstoppable at that time. Even when the FIA changed the regs and he had to do two days of cleaning in 2015, he was still winning rallies which was astounding.
Browne (right) enjoyed a really strong relationship with Mikkelsen
“It was difficult for Andreas to shine then because Ogier was so strong; even Jari-Matti [Latvala] found it difficult because Ogier was at that absolute peak and killing everybody.
“In the last two years we worked really, really hard, changed a lot of the ways we were preparing rallies and things and we worked together during the three weeks in between rallies and it started to pay off in ’15. He beat Jari-Matti on Saturday and Sunday on Tarmac in Spain, he would have been very happy with that second position and then Ogier made the mistake on the powerstage and Andreas took his first win.
“That was fantastic but also like a big, big relief because it felt like ‘when is it going to come?'”
Particularly after Sweden that year, where Mikkelsen was leading into the final stage before a mistake handed Ogier an unlikely win.
“Andreas had a very strong event but just made a mistake at a 90 left, slid too much sideways on the exit, the rear caught the snowbank, pulled the car in and it was done,” Browne remembers.
“It was sad then, but it’s not a bad thing. Like Sven said to me afterwards, ‘Don’t worry the win will come, and this type of mistake will make him much stronger because they almost had it, they could almost see it’. It made him stronger, so when the pressure is really on he knows there is no room for error at all, especially with Ogier in a Polo at that time.
“He was always fast in Poland, and in ’15 he was second to Ogier there after a bit of a fight, and in ’16 he won. Tänak on DMACKs in the Fiesta in ’16 was a good race because Tänak also had road position [advantage] and cleaning is really big there.”
Mikkelsen doesn't get the credit he should for Rally Poland win, believes Browne
Rally Poland 2016 is a rally often remembered for Tänak’s penultimate stage heartbreak when he picked up a puncture. The narrative, broadly speaking, is that Mikkelsen inherited that win.
But Browne isn’t so sure.
“I think Andreas doesn’t get the credit he deserves for that one because he did a really good job,” he argues.
“He was probably second or third in the championship, he wouldn’t have had the road position and he kept in touch, he kept fighting and on Sunday when the weather got really wet, we did a big, big set-up change for ground clearance because we had an idea that the sand would get quite rutted.
“So we went plenty of ground clearance – I think the others didn’t really do as much. Tänak hit a rock that was buried in the ruts and he got a puncture. We hit the same rock, we dented the rim but the tire stayed up – maybe because of our ground clearance and ride height – and Andreas picked up that rally win.
“He definitely deserved it and he fought hard for it. And Australia ’16, fighting to the death against Ogier for the last Volkswagen win and like I was saying about Sweden, that was three days of on the edge, absolutely flat out [driving] – not just every stage but every split was a massive fight.
“This time Ogier made the mistake and Andreas took it, so for sure the experience of Sweden paid off then as he had that experience to make sure he’s not the one who breaks.
“Four fantastic years of rally that’s for sure with a great team, great car, great drivers – really, really enjoyable.”
As with everything in life, the numbers really do only tell half the story.
Look out for an additional feature next week exmaining another area where Volkswagen’s WRC success was unparalleled.
