Looking out over Ott Tänak’s Ford Puma Rally1, M-Sport team principal Richard Millener’s dry wit had to be appreciated.
The Estonian-flagged Ford was sitting beneath gathering storm clouds in Sardinia. Instead of being out on the stages, it was being dried out after becoming the latest victim of the Italian island’s water-splashes.
Heavy rain in the run up to the sixth round of the World Rally Championship had turned just about every hole in the road into a potential water crossing. Toyota was the biggest victim, with three of its four GR Yaris Rally1s falling foul of roads which had turned to rivers. But Tänak too was silenced.
One of the issues the teams face with WRC competition these days is specific testing. Back in the day, an Argentina test would, for example, have included plenty of running up and down a road with a water-splash dug into it. Diggers would have been deployed to deepen the water, extend the length of the crossing and when that was done, they would move across to another road and try a faster approach. Then a slower approach. Then a more sideways approach.
Nothing was left to chance.
With 21 days for the whole season, dedicating three or four days to getting your car across water in the fastest fashion possible would be total folly.
“You can’t reproduce these [water-splashes] in testing,” said Millener. “Before the event, we hadn’t had any rain in the UK for a fortnight, so we couldn’t do anything with the [permanent] test site.
“There’s just no water, unless you want to drive it into a lake. And we’ve tried that…”
M-Sport’s water-related issues were, of course, very different to those experienced in México 2015, but the resultant retirement hits just as hard.
The Puma’s exit was far less dramatic than that of the Yaris. Tänak’s approach looked calmer coming into the crossing, but still the pressure was too much.
“The pressure of the water under the bonnet is pretty incomprehensible,” said Millener. “In the Toyotas, the pressure escaped by blowing the front of the car off. Ours was staying confined, but it caused issues [under the hood].”
Toyota technical director Tom Fowler took a typically analytical approach to his post-event considerations.
“Anybody who’s been water-skiing in their life will know how much damage water can do,” said Fowler. “It hurts. It’s why we wear two pairs of shorts. We have to be realistic about the volume of water the car can handle.
“If we separate the topics out a little bit, there’s a dedicated system in the car for closing off the engine and redirecting water, commonly known as the water-splash valve and this was operating correctly and functioned as we would expect.
“The bit which we are doing more analysis on is in the case of Taka [Katsuta] and Séb [Ogier] where the front bumper was destroyed. As soon as you remove the front bumper, of course, more water than normal can go into the engine bay. We’re evaluating whether this is a technical issue or something we can work on with the approach to the water itself.”
Katsuta apologized to the team for what he fessed up to as an overly enthusiastic entry speed.
Fowler points out, however, the entry speed is a delicate balance.
“Maybe people are thinking someone comes the water at 100mph and someone else comes there at 20mph. It’s just not like this. The difference is a couple of miles per hour either way and you’re talking about: do you just catch your front bumper or do you not?
“And as soon as you catch a big section of bumper and it pulls the whole car [further] into the water and then you’re trying to stop 1.5 tons very quickly against a river. It’s very tricky.
“I don’t think we have a huge technical issue with this, but on the other hand at least Hyundai seem to have had a better run through water than us.”
In the absence of events like Argentina and Rally GB, water-splashes have become much less of a thing.
“To actually test for water-splashes is really difficult,” Fowler said. “Environmentally, finding countries where they want you to drive through rivers is tricky. Most test roads we have don’t include water-splashes, and if they do they require us to go over a bridge or a construction because they don’t want us to drive in the water.”
Looking forward to next week’s Safari Rally Kenya, the teams will eye the skies nervously, but Fowler’s keeping the faith with the hardware.
“We’re confident with where the water goes,” he said. “When everything goes correctly, if you have a certain amount of water hit the car that with the [water-splash valve] system we have we can redirect that and keep the engine dry. That’s not a problem.
“The problem comes when you have so much force from the water that you start to create openings that shouldn’t be there, and then you have more water than you would have if those openings weren’t there, then you need to handle more water.
“ I think the only question we need to answer is are we damaging the car too easily? And is that the car, is that the driver, or is that a combination of both?”
Naivasha next week will, more than likely, provide more proof and plenty of answers.
