The driver Subaru wanted but couldn’t have

Britain needed its next rallying megastar.

Colin McRae had disappeared from the World Rally Championship, Richard Burns was ill. It was time for the next generation to step up.

Or at least, that was the plan.

Back in 2004, Guy Wilks vs Kris Meeke was being billed as the next ‘battle of Britain’. Both were competing in Junior WRC.

“We were being billed by the press by this point as the young upstart Burns-McRae battle,” Wilks tells DirtFish. “It was always a good fallback story at that point, you know, who’s got the upper hand between Wilks and Meeke. So it was, I suppose, regular attention.”

History shows that Meeke ultimately won that battle, as he enjoyed top-class spells with Mini, Citroën and Toyota – winning five world rallies.

But Wilks could have got there first. He’ll tell you he should have.

This is the story of the driver Subaru World Rally Team wanted to partner Petter Solberg in 2005, but couldn’t have.

Making a name for himself

Having impressed Suzuki team manager Risto Laine with his performance at 2003’s Rally Finland behind the wheel of a Ford Puma S1600, Englishman Wilks snapped up a manufacturer contract with Suzuki for 2004 at just 23 years old.

And things were going well. Ahead of the season finale in Spain, Wilks led team-mate Per-Gunnar Andersson by three points. He was laser focused on securing the title, not what his future may be in the sport.

Not that he didn’t feel he was worthy of a chance in a World Rally Car.

“I’ll tell you now, we used to get quite frustrated as junior drivers when we used to hear announcements of drivers that factory teams would take and we’d think, ‘Well, what have they done in the last two or three years? You know, they’ve plucked them out of obscurity, put them in a car, whether it was for one event, two events, three events, how come we don’t get a chance?'” Wilks shares.

“The obvious thing now, looking back, was that we weren’t necessarily tried and tested, although us being hungry young upstarts and not really giving too much thought for our own preservation if you like, we thought that we were faster, as simple as that.

“’I know we can go faster than those drivers,’ and that’s not just me – we used to collectively talk.”

Although he would lean on his father for advice, Wilks was managing his own career but didn’t have the confidence to just approach team managers.

“I was completely naive at that point in my career and if anything a little bit shy of reaching out and approaching the likes of Malcolm [Wilson],” he says. “If Malcolm bumped into me and had conversation with me of course I’d have conversation and, you know, at points he did ask me a few questions – but never anything formal, you know, just, ‘What are you doing next?’ Obviously all of the top management at that point, they knew what nearly everybody was doing.

“WRC was very busy at that point. You had a lot of drivers in a lot of manufacturer cars. So they were obviously looking at that. But there was always this crazy undertone of the JWRC and these massive, colossal fights that were over seconds, sometimes tenths of seconds, after two days of rallying. So there was interest from the top management.

“But I used to manage everything myself. I was completely self-sufficient in terms of my own career. We were headlong, we knew we were at the sharp end coming to the end of the season, I was fully focused on what I was doing. It was my second year in Junior World Championship and, wow, I’ve got a chance of winning here.

“So I was just trying to unearth every stone and trying to make sure that I wasn’t going to miss a trick to make it happen. At the same time, not focus on it too much, you know, and just let the driving, as it were, do the talking and the team do their job.”

Then he got a call…

Subaru makes an approach

“I would say it was about three weeks before Catalunya, the last round,” Wilks begins, with razor-sharp memory. “I was doing some work in the family business and I was running an errand from one garage to another and I know exactly where it was. It’s vivid in my memory.

“I pulled out of a garage near Bishop Auckland, my dad had built and owned a petrol station and car garage, Chrysler Jeep dealership, and I was going from the Chrysler Jeep dealership to a Saab dealership that we had in Durham. I pulled out of the garage and I didn’t have hands free at that point and the phone rang. This was back in the day, it was 2003 when you didn’t get hammered for driving on your phone, you’d never do it now.

“I saw it was this [unknown] number that cropped up, so I thought, ‘I’ll not answer that’. And then I thought, ‘It’s ringing a long time, I better answer it’. So I answered it. And the voice came in: ‘Guy, it’s Paul Howarth from Prodrive. Are you driving at the moment? Can you talk?’ I said, ‘I am driving.’ He said, ‘Well, if you can find somewhere to pull over, I’ll hang on the phone. Somewhere safe, and then we can talk then’.

“So I put the phone on the passenger seat. I was in a left-hand drive recce car that I used to have – a [VW] Golf which was just a left-hand-drive car – and so I pulled over into this lay-by and the conversation started.

“And Paul said, ‘Yes, so obviously it’s Paul Howarth from Prodrive, I’m just doing some junior driver profile updates and I’ve got a couple of holes on yours and I’m just wondering if you’ve got time to answer a few questions?’

“‘Yeah, no problem.’ So the conversation ensued.

“And at that point, once I knew who it was, the 30 seconds of realization of finding the safe spot to pull over, I can tell you now, the heart started racing. What the hell? What does Paul Howarth… because at that point, I’d said hi to him probably a few times through the service area. Hadn’t really had a conversation with him, but you know, as a youngster, you know obviously David Lapworth, Paul Howarth, David Richards were synonymous with Prodrive. They were the names. Just like Malcolm was and still is at M-Sport.

“And so my heart started racing before I even got onto the phone call proper, as it were. So yeah, he ran through a few questions, asked me a few details. At the end of the conversation, he said, ‘Don’t read into this phone call too much. I may be in touch in the future or I may not.’ So I said, ‘Oh, that’s fine. Absolutely no problem. If you need anything else, just give me a call’.

“So I put the phone down and by this point, my head is starting to spin. Suzuki are pressuring me because I had a one-year contract. Suzuki, literally for the previous two weeks before that phone call, are pressuring me to sign a contract. Suzuki wants a two-year extension for ’05 and ’06.

“I’m not even thinking there’s a WRC car opportunity coming on the horizon. So I’m thinking, ‘Wow, yeah, great. I’ve secured my opportunity.’ I didn’t really need money at that point in my life. I’ve secured an opportunity to drive a rally car for free for another two years. Get in! But let’s just make sure we can take a bit of advice and look at this in a bit more depth than previous years.

“So, for two weeks they’ve been pressuring me to sign this because we’ve ironed everything out. I’m just holding off, then I took this phone call, so I ring my dad straight away. I said, ‘Dad, I just had this phone call from Paul Howarth’. At that point, I probably needed to explain to my dad [who he was] because my dad was headlong into business.

“I gave him a word for word [description] because he said, ‘Look, what did he tell you at the end? That’s the most important’. I said, ‘Dad, what did he mean by this? “Don’t read into it too much,” but why has he called me?’ He said, ‘Well, he’s just doing exactly what he said. He’s filling junior driver profiles. Obviously, you’re on the radar, and he’s just asking a few questions.’

“So another week went by, and we’re getting probably two weeks away from Catalunya. And now Suzuki are in my ear. ‘Look, if you don’t want to sign this, then we’ll have to look elsewhere,’ basically. So I was like, definitely not losing this. Bang. Signature on the paper.”

This would prove a pivotal moment.

“I haven’t heard back from Prodrive,” Wilks adds. “Now, the mistake I made was because I was shy at that point of ringing people like that, I should have rung Paul Howarth back and said, ‘Paul, I’ve just got this opportunity, you know the conversation you had with me, is there anything really that I need to pause on signing this for?’

“I didn’t do that because obviously I didn’t have that relationship, that confidence, etc etc. So, signed with Suzuki, thought nothing of it. Right, let’s focus on Rally Catalunya.”

Junior WRC title slips away

With his future sorted, Wilks set about trying to win the championship. But then Paul Howarth called again.

“It was a three-day recce, so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” Wilks recalls. “At the end of Tuesday, Paul Howard rang me: ‘Can you come for a meeting tomorrow night? And dinner, if you like.’

“And I said, ‘As much as I appreciate that, I’m concentrating on the championship. Could we not make it after the event?’ Now at that point, I’ve just brushed it to one side. Like, it doesn’t matter anyway, I’m signed with Suzuki, but why has he rung me?

“So of course, it was a little bit of a distraction but it didn’t really distract me on the event.”

All had been going according to plan. With a points advantage over team-mate Andersson who was one spot ahead in second, third-placed Wilks could afford to slip to fifth behind Jari-Matti Latvala and Larry Cols and still win the title.

But a final day tire call would prove his undoing.

Wilks: “It had been raining overnight, but we ended up going on a slick tire because the temperature was rising at a certain rate, although it hadn’t got to dawn yet. And as you well know, when you’re a little bit older, obviously the sun rising drags the temperature back down by a couple of degrees generally in certain climates or times of year. And so the temperature was rising.

“The road was predicted to dry for the second and third stage. And I said, ‘We just need to really match what everybody else is on’. The call was pretty much made, not for us, but collectively. Nearly everybody else in front of us went on inters. And I was like, ‘holy moly’.

“Long story short, I couldn’t get temperature in the slick tire at all. I wasn’t driving high speed, but I was weaving side to side down the roads, braking hard, up the gears, back down the gears, and couldn’t get temperature.

“Anyway, a kilometer and a half into the first stage, it was really new Tarmac, really quick, and I couldn’t generate a lot of side loading. So I snatched the rear tire on the braking into a tight corner, slid off the road and went down a really steep embankment.

“Game over.

“We got out of the car, obviously heartbroken. Looked at it, thinking can we get a rope on this? Pull it out. Well, there’s potential, but it’s a really dangerous place because what’s happened with us, we’re on the exit of the corner of the outside in a ditch, probably bit more than halfway around the corner.

“I would say we were there for no more than two minutes. Phil [Pugh, co-driver] had my phone in his bag as I didn’t want distraction. And he said, ‘Oh, your phone’s ringing. And I said, ‘Oh, who is it?’ thinking: I don’t want to answer a call to anyone.”

Guess who?

“He said, ‘It’s Paul Howarth’.”

The meeting with Subaru

News had travelled fast. And Subaru acted.

“He’s like, ‘Guy, it’s Paul Howarth, really sorry about what’s happened. Are you both OK?’

“‘Yeah, we’re both fine.’

“‘Yeah, I know you’ll be very upset, but is there any chance, as soon as you’re back to service, you can come and have a meeting with us?’

“‘I don’t know Paul, I’ll have to go back and see the team. I’ll see.’

“‘Yeah I know there’s a lot going on in your mind, I’ll leave you to it. Give me a call if you can come around to us in the service park.'”

Initially, that wasn’t Wilks’ plan. As he’s said, he wasn’t worried about his future. That was with Suzuki. The right thing to do was be present to support his team-mate Andersson, who was now in prime position to take the title.

“I went back to the team – and obviously at this point we’ve gone from hero to complete zero,” Wilks laughs. “Obviously my mechanics who were all in for me, I’ve gone and explained to them what went on, how it all ended and they’re all as disappointed as I was.

“But then for the team, the massive focus now is P-G. They want to win a Junior World Championship and P-G’s got a chance. So literally the barometer had switched. Nobody really cared about us as soon as we got back to service. And so Monster and Risto, everybody was focused on PG – and rightly so, you know.

“But I thought: bloody hell, I’ve been given the real cold shoulder here, you know, and I felt you could have at least put an arm around me to a certain extent, and there was probably time to do that. Anyway, I thought: bugger this, I’m going to go for a walk and see what the hell all this has been about.

“So I wandered off, rolled my Suzuki overalls down, wrapped them up inside out, tied them around my waist, walked down around the Subaru camp, around the back of it, looked left, looked right, jumped over the fence, the barrier, and just ran straight up the steps into the back of the nearest truck, which was an arctic and I thought: it’s got a pullout on it so it’s got an office in it.

“So I ran straight up the steps as fast as I could, almost lost my footing, and I literally clapped into somebody who was building a differential. So I said, ‘Sorry, could you go and get Paul Howarth and tell him Guy Wilks is here, please. Is it all right if I go and stand at the front of the truck?’

“‘Yeah, yeah, go and stand up there, no problem’. And this guy was like completely bamboozled. As I said, just a mechanic who was obviously doing what he needed to do for a factory Subaru team.

“And so I was in the back of the truck and I was thinking: what the hell’s going on here? You know, I’ve just lost a Junior World Championship and my mind was racing. So Paul came, and he came pretty quickly, because obviously their cars had been out [of service] long before P-G. And at that point, I don’t think they were really fighting for anything on the event.

“I thought: this is probably going to be a quick chat, and he’s going to tell me what it’s all about, and that’ll be all. He said, ‘Oh, if you don’t mind coming through to the meeting room.’ So we went through to the meeting room, slid this pocket door back in the truck, went through to this meeting room, all leather sofas, nice table. He said, ‘I’ll bring everybody in.’

“I sat on one side of the table, the two chaps from STI were on the other side, and then there was Luis Moya to my left stood up, Paul Howarth in the middle, and David Lapworth to the right, all stood around the table. It’s quite a big room for being in the back of a truck, but you can imagine the space. It’s a factory team, so it’s bigger than I’d been used to up to that point!

“‘So Guy,’ he said, ‘the reason that I called you was that we would like you to be our number two driver behind Petter Solberg for next year.'”

[Long pause].

“My heart sank…,” Wilks says, “knowing the fact that I just signed a contract two weeks earlier with Suzuki. And at that point I never really understood what it might take to extract yourself from a contract both in a legitimate way by going and potentially having a conversation, or in another way, reading into it and saying, ‘Well, actually I want to terminate my contract before it’s pretty much even begun’.

“So yes, my heart sank through the floor, quite literally. And so I took probably five-six seconds to compose myself and I said ‘Paul, I just have to take you back to the conversation when you initially called me. I now wish I had called you back. But the conversation went like this.’ So I repeat the conversation. The start of the conversation and the finish of the conversation. And I said, ‘You finished the call by saying, Guy, and don’t read too much into this. I’m just collecting information to fill some holes. I may call you back or I may not.’

“There was the longest pause of any conversation. It was deadly silent. David Lapworth looked square right to Paul Howard, stood on his right hand shoulder, squared himself up to him without saying anything, as if to say, ‘What the hell did you say that for?’

“After this pause, I said, ‘And what has happened since then is Suzuki have been pressuring me to sign a contract, and two weeks ago, because I hadn’t heard back from you, I signed that contract, and that is a two-year contract.’

“The Japanese understood, because they had good English, and their faces dropped. David Lapworth was still in complete bewilderment at Paul’s signing off of the initial conversation. And Luis Moya was the first to pipe up.

“He said, ‘Guys, guys, guys, calm, calm, calm. Let’s look at this logically. OK so Guy, you have signed the contract?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ve signed the contract.’

“‘And it is with Suzuki or is it with Monster Sport?’

“‘And I said, ‘Well it’s with Monster Sport but obviously it is for the factory team in Suzuki.’

“‘Right, OK so, so…’ and you could hear him thinking.

“At this point, I think David’s eyes were burning a hole in Paul’s head still and Paul was wondering how the hell to get out of it or what could be done and it was Luis that said, to sum it up, it went on for a little bit longer than this, probably the whole meeting was 15 maybe, not even 20, minutes.

“Luis Moya came up with the plan. ‘Right, what we need to happen is we need to do this in a legitimate way. How can we get up and over to Mr. Suzuki, inside Suzuki and above Monster, you know? Maybe we get the head of Subaru to go to the head of Fuji Heavy Industries, the head of Fuji Industries to go to Mr. Suzuki,’ who was the last in the male bloodline of the Suzuki family, ‘and then he can come back down? Don’t panic. We can sort this’.”

Spoiler alert: they couldn’t.

The dream dies

That night, Wilks “drowned his sorrows” in a Spanish nightclub before waking up the next morning with “a throbbing head and realization of hell” as he began to compute the title he lost, and the sudden WRC opportunity he might not be able to take.

Prodrive had asked him to visit on Monday, so Wilks flew out of Barcelona to Newcaslte, drove down to Banbury and met more members of the team, including boss David Richards.

“Dave was absolutely adamant,” says Wilks. “‘I’m going to put this in place. We’re going to try everything we can to make this happen. We want you to be number two to Petter. You know, we believe in you. We think you’ve got all the attributes and, you know, with our support around you, we really do think you can be the next big thing,’ if you like.”

But Wilks signing the Suzuki contract undid it all. Perhaps he could’ve tried to extricate himself, but his father – who once had a Subaru dealership – had some very good advice.

“‘I’m going to tell you something now, Guy,’ he said. ‘The Japanese are a country of honor. You have signed your name on a contract with one Japanese company that another Japanese company has gone the legitimate way and they’ve said, no, we want to keep him, because at this point they said we want him to be a driver in our WRC team in 2007.

“’If you extract yourself, Subaru might look at that and say he’s not a man of honor. You might get yourself out of that contract and not have anything to go to.’”

Subaru had tried, but to no avail. Two weeks later they informed Wilks of the bad news.

“Subaru held their hands up and said, ‘We’ve been told no, so we can’t go any further’. It was just knock after knock after knock within the space of three weeks, maybe not even three weeks, two and a half weeks,” rues Wilks.

“And so as quickly as that, it went from, maybe a little bit of smoke, to a bit of a fire, to an inferno, to being extinguished. It just never happened. And that was pretty much where it ended.

“I stayed with Suzuki, didn’t fight against it from my dad’s advice, which I think was quite wise. Well, now, in hindsight, it would have been interesting to try!” Wilks laughs.

Subaru ended up partnering Solberg with Chris Atkinson; somebody Wilks feels “blossomed and he really did grow as a driver from the point he got the contract to where he ended up”.

But it was still tough to see: “We just had to suck it up and get on with it. As sour as it tasted, that was the only option we had.

“The whole 2005 Subaru opportunity is definitely not what might have been, [but] what could have been,” Wilks adds. “I knew I was ready, I knew I was ready to go to that next step.

“And I’ll tell you what it was as well: I was ready for the next level of, if you like, engineering and support. Everything that Prodrive could have given me would have lifted me as well. It wasn’t just that I felt I was the finished package article. I knew, right, what they have, oh my goodness, how they can take pressures away from me as well as helping me.

“Who knows what it could have been. But that’s obviously the big question mark. But, yeah, that was the opportunity, how it came about and how it got snuffed out.”

The sad thing is Wilks would never get a shot again. While Suzuki had promised him involvement in the SX4 WRC program, it was delayed by a year and both he and Andersson weren’t offered money to drive in 2007 in the Juniors.

Wilks turned it down, instead hiring an older-specification Focus WRC from Ramsport before actually getting to drive the Impreza WRC he would’ve driven in 2005 at that year’s Rally Ireland. He peaked with a second-fastest time on the final day, finishing sixth overall.

Then there was the potential for him to drive a satellite Subaru in 2009 through private funding, almost bringing the entire story full circle. But Subaru decided to pull out of the WRC and the chance naturally vanished.

“We had it all agreed,” Wilks says. “I was going to be traveling down to Banbury to Prodrive. But I got a call at seven o’clock saying, ‘You probably know the bad news by now, but Subaru have pulled the plug.’ I was like, ‘You are joking.’

“Everything was literally agreed. The funds were there. It was laid out how it was going to be run. My spec of car was going to be factory spec, exactly identical. And yeah, the guy who was funding it was a very, very good businessman and said basically to David Richards, ‘If you’ve believed in him once before, you must still believe in him again. Why don’t you come on board?’ Words to that effect, I don’t want to drop anybody too much in it!

“It was going to be like, ‘Wow, I’ve got this back. Four years later, I’m going to get this opportunity.’

“Obviously…,” he laughs, “it didn’t. My career is full of what might have beens, what weren’ts and a few what he dids.”

Wilks would migrate to compete in the Intercontinental Rally Challenge, having already stepped back to the British championship and picked up two titles with Mitsubishi. He retired after the 2011 season with Peugeot UK, falling out of love with rallying.

“The stars never aligned,” he concluded. “I hold my hands up, you know, I made mistakes. I could have had one… I could have had three Junior World Championships. I don’t. I’m the first person to say, could have, would have, didn’t.

“Winning two British championships… Jesus, if I hadn’t won those two British championships, I wouldn’t have a lot of silverware to take away!” he grins.