I don’t mind admitting it, I wasn’t convinced.
When Grégoire Munster told us at the World Rally Championship’s official launch that he hoped to replicate what Adrien Fourmaux managed last year for M-Sport Ford, it felt like an unrealistic objective.
But now, I’m not quite so sceptical.
For what Munster produced at the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally was more eye-catching than anything we’ve seen from him before in a Rally1 car. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but Munster’s upward trajectory is noteworthy and leads to suggest that he has a lot more potential than many of us perhaps thought.
So what’s changed? What happened over the off-season and on the Monte to transform Munster into a WRC stage winner and a driver no longer totally cut adrift from the fighting pack?
“I think we showed some good pace on an event we know a bit better and with a car that was in a very good window – at least it felt way better than last year. So we feel everything improved basically,” is Munster’s initial verdict to DirtFish.
First angle to explore then: the car. We know M-Sport has introduced new, shorter gear ratios for the Puma Rally1, but there’s been some finetuning as well.
Handling improvements to the Puma helped Munster find some speed
“I mean, last year in Monte we were struggling with some things and we changed these things during the year so we had some changes that happened like end of year, even like before Japan and before Central Europe,” Munster explains.
“But this was also working for Monte because that’s where we noticed them [last year] and where we said we needed some adjustment and so the adjustment we brought last year are helping this year as well in Monte.”
Those adjustments were to the handling.
“Yeah. So working with the chassis and so on, and then you have also that new gear ratio, which was planned even with the hybrid, but without the hybrid it’s very good as well. I feel the car is in a good place.”
The car needs to be driven though, and unquestionably Munster drove it well on the Monte. But the signs of progression have been hidden in plain sight – like his two fifth place finishes to round out 2024, and his near-stage win in Japan.
It’s not as if Munster has suddenly transformed himself over the off-season; he’s gradually been progressing and managed to make a statement to open 2025.
Munster’s big handicap last year was experience, but now he’s driven all the rallies in a Rally1 car. And with everyone adjusting to life without hybrid as well as Hankook’s tires, he’s no longer the guy with a major experience deficit to the rest.
All of that helped the 26-year-old make an impression last month.
“For sure the car is important in the way that going from a Rally2 to a Rally1 is not easy, it’s a step for sure,” Munster says.
“But like I always say: the experience of the rally itself is extremely, extremely important and Mārtiņš [Sesks] has shown that last year in Poland and Latvia where the guy was just flying and being faster than guys like Ogier and Tänak in some stages [despite never driving a Rally1 car before].
“And in Chile it was a bit more complicated, but because that’s normal. So you have the step of the car and being in Rally1 and sometimes opening the road or stuff like this, but you also have that experience of the stages, and not only the stage, but I mean… you have the stage knowledge, which is important, and then you have the stage knowledge with the car, which is also so important.
“Once you’ve done a stage, and you know, OK, this corner is flat with such a car, or I can trust the aero in this corner, or the hybrid is not gonna do anything stupid in that corner, all these things are so important.”
With experience banked, Munster has been able to push harder. But he’s also benefited from a change in mindset.
“The thing is I don’t set myself objective per event anymore,” he reveals. “So for sure, I have some targets for the year like we’ve done a couple of top five [finishes the] previous year – we would like to start the season a bit on the same momentum that we ended the previous year.
“So I mean, of course, we have some targets that we would like to achieve, but it’s not like I’m starting an event and I say, ‘OK, this event, I need to get myself a fastest time because it didn’t happen last year’ and so on.
Munster believes experience of rallies are even more important than experience of the car
“This only creates extra pressure and if you don’t achieve it, then you will start changing your driving style or changing your strategy just to achieve that goal. So it’s more like targets than a proper objective, I would say.
“That strategy is already in place from last year,” Munster adds. “I mean, mid-season we were having a couple of less good results and I think it’s a bit the thing that you have with any rookie that comes and starts in the sport and you think you need to show everyone your pace and so on.
“But at the end of the day, you’re fighting against guys like Rovanperä, Ogier, Neuville, Tänak – they’re all world champions. So you need to understand that you need to have a bit of patience as well.
“And if you actually just take things a bit slowly and you have a nice approach where you improve step by step, then it will come from itself. And I think that’s the strategy we had at the end of the year, which started to work pretty well. And we had the same one in Monte.”
The net result was obvious. Munster’s maiden WRC stage win on Saturday was the highlight, but he was also the quickest driver on Friday morning when he made a brave tire call to fit super-softs onto his Puma, and was running as high as fourth overall before a puncture set him back.
Road position (first) helped Munster on his way to that stage win, but again he still did the job – even though he was convinced at the time he hadn’t done enough.
“No, honestly, I went out of the stage and I directly told Louis [Louka, co-driver] ‘this is not going to be it’,” he says.
“Because I honestly had a really good effort in it and I felt really good for like 90% of the stage. But there was a 10% where I felt actually the tire started to move, overheating a bit, and as I had a puncture the day before, I thought I had a puncture in a corner. And I asked Louis to watch if we had a puncture, this got me a bit out of my zone and I needed 1-2km to come back to the 100%, so my stage wasn’t perfect.
“That’s just the truth. Coming out of the stage, I thought it’s not going to be it. I wasn’t perfect. And at the end of the day, that’s also what you see. You don’t always need to be perfect to have a stage win. No-one is always perfect on a stage, but also sometimes you have a bit of help from the road position, from a tire choice, from maybe weather condition that changes throughout the stage.
“But it’s good we got that first stage win. We know we can do it and we showed as well on the day before that we were able to do twice in a row second fastest [time] and on Friday morning we were the fastest car out there.
“At the end of the day also, you don’t need to have this stage win [to prove your speed]. If, over the whole day, you’re always third [on stages] but you finish first of the day, then it’s better than the stage win. But it’s always a nice feeling.”
What’s evident is Munster has a very mature outlook on things nowadays. His response to what his stage win will do for his confidence going forward is yet another example of this.
“For sure, I think it’s like any sport, when you do something and you know you can do it, that always gives you a confidence boost,” he says. “But it’s also not like we won an event or that we got the podium.
“So for sure, I would say it’s a nice confidence boost and it’s also a nice reward for all the work we are doing for such a long time. It’s also a nice reward for the team, but I would say the only thing is that when you’ve done it once it proves you can do it, but it also just gives you the will to get some more because it’s such a nice feeling.
“So it’s an extra motivation I would say.”
Munster and co-driver Louis Louka have their eyes on the next target
Of course we can’t ignore the elephant in the room: Munster’s Monte was far from perfect after he crashed out on Sunday.
But there was an element of misfortune in what happened.
“Over all the stages we had like four or five patches of black ice,” Munster explains. “All the time I had it, it was in left handers which sounded normal for me because I had the super-soft on the front-right at the time.
“Then I got caught in one black ice spot in the right hander in fourth gear. And even with the snow tire on the front-left, nothing happened, so we went straight into the mountain.
“You know, I’m not one that often tries to find excuses or something for a mistake. I think I’m pretty fair with myself and mistakes I do, but on this one, the gravel crew, we had zero information. For them, the whole complete stage was just fully damp and no black ice, but there is not much I can do.
“And from what Evans, Neuville, Rovanperä and so on said, if I wasn’t first on the road, it would have been someone else [who went off].”
The incident dented Munster’s Monte (as well as his car), but didn’t ruin the impression he left.
“We were actually doing like a really great event,” he believes. “Like we didn’t have any spin, we didn’t have… and I mean even like the puncture, OK a puncture happened and then time-wise we were then a bit further and not fighting for top five straight away, but we didn’t feel anything with the puncture and so basically we felt we had a really good event.
“We are showing our pace, we are making the team proud and so on and then suddenly we had that accident which came a bit of nowhere. We are also a team with less budget than the others and when you go off and these things cost budget, you know it’s not ideal.
Munster's Monte went well, but he knows he has to replicate that performance on future events
“So yeah, it’s just a bit that feeling of if you could have ended the Sunday, then of course all the feedback would have been very positive and there we didn’t reach the finish. So it was a bit mixed but all in all we were quite happy with what we’ve shown.”
Munster’s mission now is proving this was no flash in the plan; that instead it’s the start of a more competitive Munster who’s to be taken more seriously. And at least the one silver lining from his Monte DNF is Munster will start down the running order for Sweden.
“I think we’ve shown great pace in Monte Carlo, but it’s an event we know and so on. For sure, in Sweden it’s going to be a bit more tricky because we don’t have so much experience there,” he concludes.
“But still, we want to improve, we want to show that we learned from last year. And so having that road position is going to be an advantage and an advantage that we will want to use.
“So yeah, for sure in that negative, from the accident of Monte Carlo, there is a positive for Sweden.”