The juxtaposition is incredible. Toyota’s technical director Tom Fowler has been talking for 15 minutes about last week’s Safari Rally Kenya, but he’s yet to deliver deep-dive detail on Takamoto Katsuta’s maiden World Rally Championship win.
Much as Fowler relishes success, it’s failure which keeps him awake at night and having three cars retire from the Safari was the stuff of Tom’s nightmares. Predictably, he’s been over and over round three and has a number of observations about how a possible top-five finish ending as a first and third for Katsuta and Sami Pajari.
Oliver Solberg, Sébastien Ogier and Elfyn Evans all retired on or following the Sleeping Warrior stage on Saturday. The trio returned to dominate Super Sunday, while Katsuta won the event.
Fowler told DirtFish: “I feel for Taka in this situation. We don’t want his victory to be undermined by the difficulties the rest of the team faced, but at the same time we have to recognize that as a team we didn’t do the best job for all our cars.
“This was probably the most complex Safari we’ve done. It’s the one which involved the most amount of elements. If this really was a story of a single component failure and we have to work out why and make it better for next time, then that’s a hard lesson to learn. And there may be some engineering to do – in fairness this has already been done and it was done overnight on Saturday, because nobody in the team could sleep!
“So, we can say from a technical point of view, the car should have been better, no doubt. If the car broke, it can always be better. But at the same time, we need to question our strategy.
“I think it’s fair to say that throughout the whole team, we had a huge benefit of performance over our rivals on this event. Our cars were faster than everybody else – we saw quite early on, that we had a performance level that the others can’t match. At the same time, we had the information that this is the most difficult rally that Kenya has shown us in six years and that the weather conditions are the worst that we’ve seen any time that we’ve been there.
“With these two pieces of information, what we should have done is find a way throughout the whole team, through the engineers, the drivers, co-drivers, mechanics, everybody, that we use that performance benefit to outweigh how difficult the rally is going to be and use it to take a margin over our rivals.
“But actually, what we did was, across all of the levels, we accepted that we were going to race each other. This is one of those human topics which we need to look at. Yes, there are influences from the engineer’s side as well as from the driver’s side. I think we could have worked better together to manage the risk.
“Was this the Safari where we learned the most lessons? I would say this is the Safari which presented the most complex and layered challenge to us. But yes, we learned lessons.”
Fowler discusses those lessons and the thinking behind them fully in his exclusive column on Club DirtFish.
