Pierre-Louis Loubet was already frustrated. Stage three of Rally Spain had derailed his hopes of fighting in the midfield, as a front-left puncture had cost him almost a minute.
“I have no idea,” said the bemused M-Sport driver. “After the chicane the tire exploded. I did the brake, everything was fine, I turn, the tire… I don’t understand.”
Nearing the end of stage four, his patience went from being worn thin to worn out.
“POSSIBLE?” Loubet shouted in frustration. His eyes darted over to the right as his M-Sport Ford Puma Rally1 traversed the final few corners. Zipping away from the stop control without speaking to anyone showed something was up.
Out Loubet and co-driver Vincent Landais hopped, extinguisher in hand, and up went the hood. Smoke wafted from the rear-right corner of the engine bay.
What wasn’t entirely clear is why his Puma was smoking. It was somewhat reminiscent of a small electrical fire Sébastien Loeb suffered on Safari Rally Kenya, which had robbed him of the opportunity to compete for victory.
This, it transpires, was not the same thing.
“On the middle of the stage, we had some smoke in the car and we had more and more,” explained Loubet.
“At the beginning, I was thinking I had a puncture, so I drove a bit more slowly. At the end, in the car I smelled something strange and it was starting to burn a bit. So we stop and we manage it.
“I hope it’s not too big because it’s when we put the stage mode on that this happened.”
So what was that strange smell? M-Sport team principal Richard Millener suspects he knows what’s gone awry – and why it was on the right-hand side of the car.
“I don’t think this one was actually in the engine bay,” Millener told DirtFish.
“From what we can see so far, it’s probably one of the joints in the exhaust maybe coming loose. You’ve got incredibly hot temperatures from the stages so that’s probably what caused the smoke.
“Difficult to even say how much flames, or if there were even any flames. In the heat of the moment, you can maybe see or say things that are more extravagant than they are in reality.”
M-Sport’s reality in Spain has been a painful one yet again. Craig Breen leads the team’s charge down in eighth place but has been all at sea, seemingly having written pacenotes far too conservative for the conditions.
“Yeah, we’d have hoped to be a little bit closer to the front,” Millener added.
“We’ve got to be realistic of road position and the fact the cuts are probably quite wet this morning after the rain last night. But equally, you look at Ogier’s pace, he’s able to fight closer to the front than we are.
“We know the car’s good on Tarmac so it’s a little bit surprising.
“But you shouldn’t judge an entire rally based on a morning. This afternoon’s a bit more of a leveler with everyone in similar conditions, so let’s see where we’re at then.”
Breen is already 44.5 seconds off the lead and did not cut a confident figure at midday service on Friday.
“The biggest thing I’ve found is I’ve made my notes way too slow,” he explained.
“Like I said, I haven’t done the rally for a long number of years; I can’t remember the last time I drove it in full dry. So I made them with probably a far lower grip than what’s actually out there and just hemorrhaged time left, right and center.”
