“I think, of course, it’s difficult,” he ponders. “If it wasn’t, then anyone could do it.”
Grégoire Munster has a point. Competing at the very top level of the World Rally Championship is no picnic, and the first two thirds of Munster’s maiden full season in a Rally1 certainly show that.
Twelfth in the world championship (just one point ahead of Rally2 pilot Oliver Solberg) with just one top-five finish certainly doesn’t make for the best reading.
But is there a case to be made that the M-Sport driver’s campaign is greater than the sum of its parts? Is the context of his situation being lost and making his performances look weaker than they perhaps are?
During an insightful, and open, interview, Munster discusses that very topic with DirtFish, as well as his areas for improvement, prospects for 2025 and why the last four rallies of the season should be better for him.
Munster’s situation is unique
Sardinia (fifth) is the best result of Munster's season so far
Munster would be the first to admit that he hasn’t been the best performer of the season so far, but there have been flashes of promise.
Beating Takamoto Katsuta on merit in Poland was an encouraging step, as was his fifth-placed finish in Sardinia. But in the main, the Luxembourger has been a subplot to the season’s narrative at best.
However, expecting too much more than that wouldn’t be totally fair.
Of course there have been drivers such as Mārtiņš Sesks and Sami Pajari who have been handed a Rally1 chance and stunned with it, but both were competing on events and surfaces familiar to them.
Munster hasn’t had that luxury. It’s not just that he’s low on Rally1 mileage – he’s low on WRC mileage in general. Prior to the start of the 2024 season, Munster had only started 26 world championship events.
Of the full-timers, only his team-mate Adrien Fourmaux is in a similar ballpark but still has almost twice the experience with 45 starts, while there’s an entire cast of competitors currently in WRC2 (Oliver Solberg, Gus Greensmith, Pierre-Louis Loubet, Sami Pajari and even those without top-class experience like Yohan Rossel, Nikolay Gryazin and Kajetan Kajetanowicz) who are up on Munster in terms of WRC appearances.
Munster lacks a real yardstick, as nobody is anywhere near as inexperienced as he is
Couple that to the ultra-competitiveness of today’s field, with drivers essentially memorizing stages and needing to be millimeter perfect to win stages, and maybe a clearer picture of Munster’s campaign to-date begins to emerge.
With no other driver in his situation, learning both the car and the events, there is no yardstick to judge where Munster lies, and he’s always going to look poor given he’s learning and everyone else is on top of their game. With this handicap, it’s been quite difficult for the 25-year-old to truly show the world what he’s capable of.
“Yeah, the thing is…,” he begins, “I think, of course, it’s difficult. If it wasn’t, then anyone could do it.
“But I have the feeling that in some events, we managed to show some good pace with second and third fastest time, which is something that, for example, Adrian was able to do a couple of years ago in Croatia when he started, and at that time everyone was like really impressed.
“And today we feel a bit like today it’s not enough, you need to be able to to fight for like top five regularly or do fastest time on a stage a bit like like Mārtiņš did in his home event, so that’s what makes it difficult.
“But we go our way, we try to do the best we can. And yeah at the end of the day, if people notice it or not, that’s not in our hands. We do the best we can and if we don’t leave anything on the table, then we can live with that.”
You cannot turn down an offer to go driving a Rally1 car. Everyone would go for it, but maybe I'm a bit prematureGrégoire Munster
So far Munster hasn’t exactly shown world champion potential but he’s not been a total no-hoper either. There have been some mistakes (Monte Carlo, Sweden, Portugal and Finland in particular spring to mind) but he’s mostly paid a heavy price for what have been small errors.
Equally, those fine margins are what matter when competing at the level Munster now is.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “like I said, in terms of stage time and so on, I think we managed a couple of times on multiple surfaces to show that we were capable of fighting at some point with the guys in front. But like you said, it’s like a couple of really small mistakes that ruined all the end results.
“Like, for example, in Monte Carlo, in Kenya, in Portugal, things like where we spun and then we were just like stuck in a ditch or something. Sometimes I had the feeling I saw some others taking a lot of risks, having similar conditions and be able to continue, but that’s sometimes part of rallying.
“If I don’t do the mistake in the first part, then you don’t need luck afterwards to get out or not. It’s more that we have to work on this tiny mistake and I think we managed to avoid some of them.
“Then you had the Finland one, where I think that’s again an off or a mistake, but it’s one I’m less worried about because I’d rather try and go too fast and just have it wrong by trying than doing a stupid mistake or a silly mistake while you were just driving and not specifically trying to overdrive or push for specific results, so yeah.”
Did he jump into Rally1 too soon?
Munster was able to leap into a Rally1 machine this year, but is aware others may have done better to begin with
Despite continually finding himself in a bit of no man’s land on the timesheets and leaderboards, Munster has “really enjoyed” his season so far.
“We have a great calendar where we drive on so many different kinds of events,” he smiles.
“Just if you go to like gravel, you cannot compare Kenya with any other event. Then you will go to Portugal and Sardinia that are way more technical. Then you will go to Poland, Latvia and Finland that are crazy fast.
“So, I mean, you’re driving on the same surface but still everything feels so different and new, so it’s quite nice to be able to drive in this championship and facing new conditions and stages every time.”
But he doesn’t hide from the fact it’s been a challenge.
Backed by Jourdan Serderidis, himself an occasional privateer competitor in the WRC with M-Sport, Munster is fortunate in that a Rally1 drive became feasible for 2024.
But unprompted, he acknowledges that this chance may have come earlier in his career than what would be ideal.
“Yeah that’s actually my biggest issue this year is that, you know, you cannot turn down an offer to go driving a Rally1 car,” Munster confesses.
A pragmatic Munster acknowledges others may have initially been better than him given his shot this year
“Everyone would go for it, but maybe I’m a bit premature, not in terms of [overall but WRC] experience like. I’ve done a lot of rallies but mostly like in Belgium or in German Championship with a small car, and in the World Rally Championship I didn’t have the budget and the time to do all these rallies.
“And some guys in WRC2 might be like a better… how do you say, better fit just in terms of experience.
“If you take Rossel for example or Gryazin that are driving for so many years in the WRC, in a Rally 2 car, then on paper, yes, they might be better straight away.
“But if you give me time to learn the stage, the car and so on, then I think we can achieve great things with Louis [Louka, co-driver].”
Why Munster should improve from here
After a four-week reset from Finland to next week’s Acropolis Rally Greece, Munster has set himself a target of setting at least one top-three stage time on each of the remaining four events: Greece, Chile, Central Europe and Japan.
Munster has more experience of upcoming events, including Japan (pictured) which he was won in WRC2 before
He feels showing his pace is more important than securing a specific result, given the various factors that can influence the leaderboard.
“In terms of results, it depends so much on the event of the competitors,” Munster argues.
“You can go to Greece and have a lot going on in terms of mechanical stuff. You can go to Japan and have crazy conditions that change the whole thing.
“I will aim rather for stage time and show that we are competitive – I would like to have a top-three stage time in every event that we have now. And for the result, we see at the end where it brings us.”
There’s reason to believe these last four events should be better for Munster too, mainly because he has far more experience.
The Acropolis is a rally he’s done in each of the past two seasons, while he’s done the other three every time they’ve featured on the WRC calendar. And in both Chile and CER, he has Rally1 experience to call upon too having made two cameo appearances with a Puma in 2023.
Munster is targeting better pace on the last four rounds of the season
“Yeah exactly,” Munster says. “I think actually the last four rallies of the season are really important to me because even for example Japan and Greece, yes we didn’t do them in in a Rally1 car but it’s maybe the rallies where we have the most experience because I’ve done Greece two times before in Japan as well.
“So yeah, the four last rallies I’m really looking forward to because of that experience and knowing that we’re going to drive on the territory we know a bit better.”
These last four events are therefore the best way to genuinely judge Munster’s abilities.
Will he stay with M-Sport in 2025?
Although there have been no announcements yet, the WRC’s ‘silly season’ is beginning to ramp up with Munster’s own team-mate a key pillar in the driver market.
Munster’s own chances of remaining with M-Sport are mainly a question of whether Serderidis wants to continue backing him for another year in a Rally1.
But he says the team is “quite pleased” with the job he has been doing considering it’s a learning year.
“Yeah, I think they said it also from the beginning of the year that they knew it’s going to be a long run, that it’s not going to be easy to try and void that gap and that lack of experience. But they are quite pleased.
“We see some areas where we can improve and so we are aiming to just solve or improve these small areas step by step and then… because at that level it’s only like small details that make the whole difference.
“So it’s good to be with M-Sport that knows how to coach like younger drivers and yeah, it’s a good teamwork to try and achieve that.”
What are those areas he can improve?
“There are some small things. For example, slower corners, I’m tending to go early on throttle, but sometimes then I lose a bit of grip, not loading the car enough on the brake until the apex.
“So that’s a small adjustment, but there are so many corners on the stage – it’s difficult to have them all perfect, but if you want to be the fastest on the stage, it needs to be that way.
Munster wants to remain part of the M-Sport fold next year
“And then my pace, but I think that’s again regarding experience and so on, My pace it’s always improving later in the day. So on the first stage, I’m always a bit slower than I would be on the end of the day, and we’re trying to improve on that area as well.”
No deal has yet been done for 2025, but Munster has made it clear where he wants to be.
“In my case, there are four rallies left and we were also discussing that with the team right from the beginning, is that we took the first half of the season just to get the experience and then the second half of the season to increase the pace.
“So for me, it’s only going to really like start now and seeing the results we’re going to do on these ones to see about ’25.
“For me it’s the perfect environment to evolve. I’ve had a great season so far with the team and I only want to continue that way.”
