The metric putting WRC’s new rookie in Rovanperä’s league

Kalle Rovanperä’s stint as the newest runt of the World Rally Championship litter is already coming to an end after only three rallies. A new arrival is on the way from Hyundai for Rally Estonia: Pierre-Louis Loubet.

A newcomer to the WRC’s top level is a rarity. Only six drivers who could be considered aspiring professional rally drivers (no gentlemen drivers, in other words) have debuted in current-specification Rally1 machinery since the current high-downforce beasts were introduced four years ago.

There’s long been suggestions by some in the paddock that the gap between the R5s used in WRC2, WRC3, the European Rally Championship and most national championships, and the modern World Rally Car is too big for rookies to cope with.

Rovanperä has helped disprove that somewhat. He’s only three rallies into his Rally1 career and he’s already got a podium to his name, and has been impressively on the pace from the off.

You could argue he’s the exception, of course. But the WRC’s baby-faced assassin isn’t going to be the new kid on the block anymore, now that Loubet will be competing in a 2C Competition-prepared Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC three times in 2020 (originally four, but Germany being canceled knocked that number down).

So here’s the obvious question: how’s Loubet going to fare at the highest level?

Luckily we’ve had a little bit of insight into that already, thanks to his back-to-back appearances on Rally di Roma and Rally di Alba’s standalone Rally1 events, run concurrently with their European Rally Championship and Italy WRC counterparts.

Our best shot at a meaningful metric to judge Loubet so far are the number of seconds per kilometre he surrendered to his esteemed colleagues during those rallies. For Roma that’s Dani Sordo and it’s Thierry Neuville for Alba. The rally formats may have been different to WRC, but the stopwatch rarely lies.

In Rome, Loubet was 0.37s/km slower than Sordo on average, after correcting for a throttle problem that sent Sordo off-road and cost him half a minute. It was a bit more than that on Rally di Alba against Neuville, at 0.54s/km.

Those numbers on their own don’t mean much, so let’s contextualise them.

Sébastien Loeb is a fairly lofty benchmark to start off with, but his run in an i20 on Monte Carlo Rally this January was an uncharacteristically poor performance. Still, a nine-time world champion having an off-day is a decent starting point.

Let’s get rid of Sunday’s stages for this; a disastrous tyre choice put Loeb off the road on SS14 and left him tip-toeing through the last two tests. Let’s judge him on his real pace that week. Said adjustment puts Loeb 0.81s/km slower than rally winner and Hyundai team-mate Neuville on average.

Better still, Loubet compares favorably to his fellow class of Rally1 rookies when assessing their first two events in a current-spec WRC car against similar opposition.

Tidemand technically wasn’t a Rally1 rookie as he’d done his home round of the championship in a previous-generation Fiesta WRC twice. But that was years ago, and his stint at M-Sport last year was the first time he’d had a proper run at the big time, so we’ll count him here. And like Loubet, he’s a WRC2 champion.

He showed that success in the support categories doesn’t guarantee speed in a Rally1 car. Tidemand was 1.3s/km off the pace across his first two outings on aggregate, in Monte Carlo and Sweden respectively. It didn’t get much better after that, and now he’s already back to the Škoda Fabia R5 that served him so well in the past.

Both Toyota’s Japanese protégé Takamoto Katsuta and M-Sport’s Gus Greensmith – two drivers who like Loubet are running part-time campaigns this year – were north of 1s/km off the leader’s pace during their first two rallies competing in Rally1 cars with WRC-calibre opposition. Katsuta had even been given two rallies in the Finnish national championship to get acclimatised to the Yaris WRC beforehand.

Then there’s a big gap. Esapekka Lappi comes in fourth, averaging 0.66s/km off the leader’s pace in Portugal and Italy combined back in 2017. Then it’s the golden boy, Rovanperä, on 0.5s/km off the top when combining Monte Carlo and Sweden.

And that average is especially important; Sweden is one of the fastest events on the calendar alongside Finland, usually leading to small time gaps, whereas Monte Carlo is at the other end of the scale given its propensity for throwing up randomness and chaos. The two help balance each other out for the purposes of deducing a usable average.

Anyway, Loubet. The reason you’re here. Roma and Alba are a world away from the cold and (sometimes) icy conditions of the Alps and Värmland. But we’re not comparing rallies here, we’re comparing deficits to the best in the business. And in Loubet’s case, that was 0.46s/km across both rallies.

This is impressive considering not only how green he was, but how sensible and mature his drive was. No crazy, wayward mistakes while pushing a la Teemu Suninen on Rally Finland 2017 (who tops this seconds-per-kilometre list of ours at 0.42s/km), but leaving a little bit of margin everywhere; leaving a foot of space on the exit here, avoiding a potentially risky cut there.

This is a good sign. He’s not found his limit yet, and he’s already in a broadly similar ballpark to where the current trio of talented young Finns were at the very start of their WRC careers.

And even though there’s a French flag on the side of his Hyundai, Loubet’s no sealed-surface specialist. All his wins and podiums in WRC2 (now WRC3) last year came on the gravel events of Portugal, Italy, and GB. He’s even got previous experience of Rally Estonia, albeit in a two-wheel-drive car, competing there in 2015 when it was an ERC event.

But I’m not getting excited just yet.

None of this guarantees Loubet’s any good in practice when it comes to performin at rallying’s highest level, of course. And though there’s a numbers-driven approach here, the data is still rather subjective.

That 0.46s/km figure is helped by Sordo and Neuville being rusty; it’d been months since either had driven a WRC car on a rally, and it was effectively a live test session for both, not a point-scoring WRC event with everything on the line. They’ll both have left something in the tank.

It does still appear that Loubet is a driver to keep an eye on for the rest of 2020. The third factory Hyundai is one of the few factory seats still up for grabs in 2021, now that Toyota’s line-up is all but formally settled and M-Sport realistically requires cash on the table from any potential suitors, as Andreas Mikkelsen has already highlighted.

Craig Breen is edging closer and closer to that Hyundai seat thanks to his patience, according to team boss Andrea Adamo, but if Loubet can turn those promising pair of Italian jobs into strong runs on the world stage, who knows what happens next?

Being in the same ballpark as Rovanperä on paper is a good starting point.

¹ Times for SS3 erased to account for rally winner Dani Sordo’s throttle issue and to establish a more accurate speed differential

² Rally Lapland, prior to Monte Carlo Rally, featured more than one current-spec Rally1 car, though no WRC drivers were present and so is not considered relevant for comparison purposes.

³ Rally Portugal SS15 removed from final figure as Lappi lost over five minutes after hitting a wall, making a realistic s/km comparison figure unrealistic were it to remain in place.

⁴ SS4 retained in calculation despite gearbox issue causing some time loss, as Lappi won SS5 with the same issue (no second gear). This indicates his true pace was not significantly compromised to a degree that required modifications to his original s/km time.

⁵ Removed SS13 from calculation as a crash led to a maximum seven-minute time being awarded under Super Rally rules

⁶ Katsuta participated in both Itäralli and Riihimäki-Ralli in a Yaris WRC before his WRC debut but did not compete against any current WRC factory drivers in either, making them unsuitable for reference.

⁷ Removed compromised SS7/8/9 times and 33 minute penalty, both of which were caused by a gearbox fault.