We’ve been here before. Sort of. M-Sport and young drivers, it’s nothing new. The team itself was keen to point this out when announcing Adrien Fourmaux and Grégoire Munster as its two drivers for the 2024 World Rally Championship season.
Shortly before Christmas, Cumbria offered context to its plans.
“Since its inception, M-Sport has established a heritage of identifying young talent in rallying and providing them opportunities to develop and flourish into top-level drivers in the WRC,” said the team in its announcement.
There is no word of a lie there. But, of course, there was a need to find the spin: the practical reality was that an established, top-line driver sitting in a Ford Puma Rally1 in 2024 was not on the cards.
Adrien Fourmaux pilots a Ford Puma Rally1 during Rally Japan 2023
Does that mean a season of making up the numbers while Toyota and Hyundai fight for all the glory? Not necessarily.
Adrien Fourmaux holds a double-edged sword. He’s in the same position as former M-Sport superstars Elfyn Evans and Ott Tänak were earlier in their careers: dropped to the second tier, forced to rethink and rebuild and then handed a second shot at the big time.
There is pressure to deliver, he is now a de-facto team leader as the only driver in the line-up with a decent level of Rally1 experience. But the rewards on offer are greater this time in that the car is capable of running at the front and if he exploits that potential and gets on the podium, the ills of a messy 2022 will be further buried.
Fourmaux enjoying the delights of DirtFish Live Center on his mobile before a stage start
To some degree, he’s already proven some of those weaknesses have been addressed. Winning the British Rally Championship was not so much an expectation as a requirement: he did so with aplomb, dominating all five rounds he entered. But he also demonstrated less frustration when the Fiesta Rally2 wasn’t quite a match for the Škoda Fabia RS early in the season. There was definitely more patience on display.
What to make of his cameo return to the Rally1 hot seat in Japan isn’t entirely clear. On paper, it was a disaster; a Friday morning crash was about as badly as the rally could have gone.
Yes, he was joined in the same ditch by the vastly experienced Dani Sordo. And yes, Takamoto Katsuta came within a cat’s whisker of making it three in the ditch, but does that matter? Actually, it does. The conditions – and their rapidly evolving nature – is a saving grace from an optics point of view. But the question is how Fourmaux has taken it. Hopefully, as a wake-up call that he won’t breeze back into the top level, that there’s still a mountain of work to be done – but that others have been where he’s been and still succeeded.
An early bath in Japan wasn't the ideal way back into Rally1 for Fourmaux
He didn’t win Rally Jeunes (France’s talent-search program that Sébastien Ogier also succeeded in to launch the eight-time world champion’s rally career) for nothing. Fourmaux’s rise, let us not forget, bordered on meteoric. He flew through the junior ranks with French federation backing.
Now he has to believe in himself. He’s in this position because he has the talent, the speed and the potential to be there. Now he has to show he has the character to exploit it. The patience he showed last season indicates he’s ready to do just that.
Patience will also come in handy for Munster. Malcolm Wilson and his team have seen Pumas crashed, rolled, ripped to bits one time too many. Munster’s rise was more methodical than meteoric, with more tier two time before the big time called.
As both team and driver have pointed out, there is a need to bide time and wait for the right moment to strike and put in ‘surprising’ performances. This is slightly complicated by Munster’s strengths and weaknesses: gravel has been pinpointed as his weaker surface, but more often than not it’s the dirt that offers the best opportunities to spring a surprise. Pierre-Louis Loubet winning stages and leading the Acropolis in his first season with M-Sport is proof in point. Opportunities to do the same on asphalt are generally fewer.
And for the team, the number one fix is reliability. Hopes of a blockbuster result for Tänak were ended by the car more than the driver last year. The team knows that, and Wilson’s already laid out plans to work on both reliability and performance.
Munster has an incredible opportunity with M-Sport this season. He has to be ready to take opportunities
There is no star in the lead car anymore, no one who can bank on a decade of experience at the top level to carve their way to the front. To be the surprise of the event, the Pumas must still be running: waiting for the scrapping Toyota and Hyundai drivers to make an error in the heat of battle. It’s not the most enthralling of strategies, but it is likely the most sensible. And the one most likely to pay dividends.
Running one car less than the others, M-Sport is likely to land third in the makes’ race – but that doesn’t mean a season with no silverware is a given.
M-Sport has been here before. And Evans and Tänak didn’t turn out too badly.
