This year’s instalment of Rally Chile may not have been as dramatic as the tire-chewing chaos of 12 months earlier, but round 11 of the 2024 World Rally Championship still taught us plenty.
There may have been no world champion crowned like many expected in WRC2, but the man in control of the drivers’ contest took another step towards title glory just as his team’s grip on the makes’ prize was significantly weakened.
Here’s what we learned from the WRC 2024’s South American flyaway to Rally Chile:
Ogier’s ninth title won’t happen
After the turbo trouble, mindgames and powerstage crash in Greece, Sébastien Ogier’s chances of an unexpected ninth world title weren’t looking too rosy when he landed in Concepción.
They’re looking even more remote as he departs back to Europe.
After taking the lead on the first stage, Ogier’s rally was already looking difficult after the third when he thwacked a bank and punctured a tire. But the rock that dislodged a bolt from his steering can now be hammered into the coffin.
“It looks like [it], for sure,” Ogier confessed.
Thierry Neuville registering another healthy score of 15 only reinforced the point. Ott Tänak nicked five points back from his team-mate, but Neuville’s lead is still 29. Ogier meanwhile is now 41 adrift with just 60 left to play for.
Toyota’s hopes reignited
Neuville may be in a very strong position to wrap up the drivers’ title at the next round in Central Europe, but his team occupies rockier ground in the race to be manufacturers’ champion.
For a while now, Toyota’s failure to properly maximize a Sunday under the new points system has looked fairly fatal in its quest to record a fourth consecutive manufacturers’ championship.
But in Chile it finally got it right.
Hyundai’s drivers and team management were at pains to point to the Toyota’s superior pace at the weekend, but the GR Yaris Rally1 locked out the top two in Saturday’s standings, the Super Sunday standings, the powerstage and the event overall.
Or to put it in other words, Toyota achieved the absolute perfect score in Chile.
Trailing by 35 points heading into the weekend, Toyota now enters the final two rounds with just 17 points to make up. Hyundai still holds the advantage, but the race is heating back up again as the season reaches its crescendo.
Munster shows a spark of potential
Pre Chile, Grégoire Munster’s first full season in Rally1 car wouldn’t have made the longest highlights reel in the world. But there were reasons for that, and the M-Sport man went some way in proving that point last weekend.
Munster’s low on WRC experience in general compared to his top class rivals, not least experience in the top car, so returning to stages he’d done before in a Rally1 car was a vital test of his credentials.
And he looked good.
Nobody had Munster down to be fifth overall, within 15s of the lead, after Friday but that’s exactly where he found himself.
The decline on Saturday (on stages he wasn’t was far too sharp and weakened his point, but Munster did show that he has the potential to be competive and to his credit, improved in the afternoon.
Eventually he finished sixth, just eight seconds behind Sami Pajari. That may seem poor with Pajari even lower on experience, but not everyone learns at the same rate and Pajari is very clearly a superstar in the making.
What Munster has to do now is show the same leap forwards on Tarmac in a few weeks’ time at Central European Rally – an event he also has prior Rally1 experience of.
Chile was indeed far tougher for Sesks
Mārtiņš Sesks was never going to replicate the heroics of Poland and Latvia, simply because he knew those rallies extremely well and had never competed outside of Europe before, let alone at Rally Chile.
In his words: “We were thrown in and we had to swim.”
Equally, judging his performance was also always going to be tricky given the differing performance levels of a hybrid and non-hybrid Rally1 car was unclear on these stages.
However it wasn’t ideal that Sesks hit a bank with such force to puncture two tires (with only one spare), when M-Sport team principal Rich Millener had urged him to make the end of the rally without damage.
Such errors can be forgiven though given they are a natural part of the development process. It only feels slightly disappointing because he set such a high bar for himself on the previous two events. And most importantly, a small half-spin aside, Sesks didn’t put a foot wrong once he restarted.
Was it the sort of performance that screamed ‘sign me now!’ to the watching world? No – but it equally didn’t need to be.
Sesks has already done enough to prove he’s worthy of a more concrete program at this level. Chile just solidified that not all of his performances are going to be at the sublime level of Poland and Latvia, but he needs weekends like that to become a better rounded driver in the future.
WRC2 title far from settled
Oliver Solberg needed to win in Chile to put the WRC2 title to bed – a simple mission on paper, but since when have rallies been won on paper?
In the end, a slow puncture cost Solberg well over a minute and the chance to finish on the podium, as he registered a risky fourth place in his Škoda.
Risky, because the door has now been left open for Chile winner Yohan Rossel and Toyota’s Sami Pajari to sneak in and steal the spoils.
Solberg’s final score is 123 points – a tally Rossel can better should he win the next round at CER.
But Pajari is the real danger man, as even if Rossel does that the Finn can gazump him with a victory of his own in Japan.
Of course both drivers still need to achieve that – as Solberg’s weekend in Chile proved, that’s a lot easier than done. But what we do know for sure is the WRC2 title will not be decided until the very last stage of the season.
