The “paradox” in Ogier’s unusual season

What must the mood be like today at chez Ogier? With rallying far from his mind during precious time with family, likely very good.

But the turning of a new year prompts moments of reflection; time to think about what we did well, what we didn’t do so well, and what we want to achieve in the forthcoming year.

Sébastien Ogier’s 2024 was both a success and a failure depending on which slant you take. But remember: claiming title number nine wasn’t on his New Year’s resolutions list this time 12 months ago.

The goal was to help Toyota win another manufacturers’ championship, and Ogier played a huge role in doing just that with his powerstage win in Japan.

But did the outcome of that season finale fit for Hollywood save the perception of Ogier’s year? Lest we forget how ropey Ogier’s form was in the three rallies leading up to Japan.

Or was it?

Welcome to the paradox of Ogier’s 2024. Not our words, but his.

Remove Acropolis, Chile and CER from Ogier’s report card and his return is stunning: three wins, four second places. Include them, and three ugly retirements rear their head – all at a time when Toyota had convinced Ogier to come and help in the drivers’ championship.

But for the most part, Ogier was still the fastest driver in those events. And that makes it all the more confusing that the rallies went so awry – even for Ogier himself.

“It’s always more challenging when you don’t do full time and that’s not new. But this year I have also seen doing a bit more, it helped me to be back on a very strong level in terms of performance,” he said.

“After these last four rallies we’ve been the best performer every rally. I really enjoyed those rallies so it was a bit like a paradox that I enjoyed them a lot.

“I felt so good behind the wheel and in the car, but somehow we didn’t get the result we wanted.”

And we all saw how much that got to him. TV pictures of Ogier screaming with anger after he’d, again, chucked away incredibly valuable points for Toyota on the penultimate stage of CER were harrowing.

I’m far from the most experienced traveller in WRC journalism, but his demeanor on the scene was far lower than I’ve ever seen, too. This was a real low, but as you’d expect Ogier knows exactly why it happened.

“I mean in this moment, of course I was angry but it’s more angry due to the fact that I put a lot of effort into all of these last races and like we just said, the performance, everything was close to be perfect,” he explained.

“But that’s rally. It’s just one mistake needed to ruin it all. That was hard to accept, that was really hard. Frustrating, especially in this moment where it’s like this typical situation where if we have a normal setup with our gravel crew it would have never happened.

“My mistake in this moment was not really a driving mistake but more like anticipation of evolution of the condition in this place where anti-cut devices were there, so you think ‘OK there is anti-cut, it should not be so dirty’ but some strange line from the back, I’ve rolled much more mud than I thought and that was game over so quickly.

“That was hard to accept but in the end, that’s rally and that’s what often been my strength in my career, trying to adapt to everything and anticipate, keep a margin a bit everywhere and in this moment there wasn’t enough margin and that’s it, that was quickly happening.

“But the best way to put that behind you is finishing in a high, like we thought in this moment. OK, stage two in Japan [where we got a puncture] didn’t feel like we will be finishing on a high.

“But finally and at the very end, we got rewarded with all the effort, with at the end having one of the best days in terms of emotion of my career in Japan, clinching the title in the last minute like this in front of our whole team, producing a strong performance in the powerstage, was at least a good moment and finishing still on the high this season.”

There haven’t been many conclusions to a season that feature more conflicting emotions than Ogier’s. But the eight-time champion has no regrets; he still achieved his target. And in his situation, with the objectives he had, pushing hard was the only realistic option.

But was he pushing too hard?

“I don’t know if it was too much,” Ogier responded. “If you go… you can take this rallies by rallies, you know, it’s like… I’m not here to try to give you excuses of why I’ve done the mistake, because I assume the mistakes, but inside they were hard to accept because they were honestly not big mistakes, but enough to win it, and you start with Greece.

“Greece, we had very strong performance and then it all started first of all with the technical issue with the turbo failure which cost us more than two minutes and then from this moment on, you need to go full attack the whole weekend. Whatever.

“Then the whole weekend goes quite OK, the powerstage, nobody expected rain on Saturday night on our team. We are the only one not having enough soft tires anymore because of the rain for Sunday. Powerstage, I have to go with full hard tires.

“Unfortunately for me, in this moment, there were spectators getting injured before our start. And we have to wait 40 minutes on the start-line, starting with cold hard [tires], no chance at all. Straight away, not even after one kilometer, puncture. I mean a lot of things going in this moment a bit against [us].

“Chile,” Ogier continued, “another rally where I was somehow stronger than expected. Having not done the rally last year, I thought it’s really a rally I need to go for and push because with the others knowing much more the stages, it would be challenging.

“But we actually ended up being really fast but unfortunately, one single pacenote which was not good put me in the situation with a puncture and then, yeah, we just talked about the the German mistake which was, I don’t know, difficult to take. But it can go quickly one way or another in this sport.

“And at the end of the day, I never lost the the faith that I can still do it, and I know I can still do it. But in this moment, it just didn’t happen. I would summarize that the most important is that at the end, at the very last stage of the season, we produced the performance we needed to still reach the target that we have set for the season, which was the manufacturer title.

“Driver title was anyway something which was not planned at the beginning and something where everything will have needed to work perfectly to happen. Again, no regrets.

“I enjoyed this season, enjoyed even this race without the result. Like I say, it’s paradoxical because I enjoyed them a lot but finished them with a lot of frustration, of course.”

All of that gives us a fascinating insight into Ogier’s thought processes, but only he can know how he’ll truly be feeling about 2024 as the world prepares to enter 2025.

Is he really that chill about missing the chance to claim the most absurd of drivers’ titles?

One thing we do know for sure is Ogier won’t be around as much next year. It’s time to go back to the original plan: genuinely compete part-time, and play his part in Toyota’s championship cause.

Monte Carlo’s just a few weeks away, and victory number 10 is dangling before Ogier’s eyes. Mercifully, there’d be nothing paradoxical in that achievement.