Nobody will envy Takamoto Katsuta just now.
Despite his best efforts, his 2024 World Rally Championship campaign has been a clear struggle and Toyota has made the difficult decision to bench him for Rally Chile.
Sami Pajari will compete instead.
But Katsuta’s time-out is only for one rally. While he will naturally be gutted to be missing the trip to Concepción, he will be back behind the wheel for both the Central European and Japanese events that conclude the season.
And that places the 31-year-old in a rather unique club of WRC drivers. While many have been dropped from a works drive either at the end of a season or during it (think Oliver Solberg in 2022 as an example), actually very few have been benched in the middle of the year.
Curiously though, one of them is a rival he faces today.
Here are three examples from the WRC’s past of drivers who were benched mid-season, and how that ultimately worked out for them:
François Duval
If there was one environment any driver probably didn’t want to be in during the mid 2000s, it was at Citroën as Sébastien Loeb’s team-mate.
But that’s precisely the challenge François Duval fancied in 2005 – giving up what would have been team leader status at Ford with Markko Märtin bound for Peugeot.
The then-24-year-old had seven WRC podiums to his name when he first sat in a Xsara WRC, but the Belgian was destined for a desperate run of form – kicked off by a heavy crash into a telegraph pole at the Monte Carlo Rally – over the first half of the season.
A fire after going off the road in Cyprus was the final straw for both co-driver Stéphane Prevot and Citroën management. Prevot walked, to be replaced by Sven Smeets, while Citroën benched Duval in favor of two-time world champion Carlos Sainz for Turkey and Greece.
Duval returned for Argentina and delivered steady performances there and in Finland, before he stormed to second in Germany and repeated the feat in Wales. He would even win his one and only WRC event in Australia, but by then the die was cast and Duval was dumped in favor of Dani Sordo for 2006.
Kris Meeke
Kris Meeke was at the peak of his powers during 2016. Turning up to the odd WRC round in a privately run Citroën DS3 WRC, the Northern Irishman won in Portugal and then famously in Finland to underline his potential as a WRC title contender the following year.
That following year was important, as new WRC regulations were afoot and gave Volkswagen’s rivals the chance to usurp the dominant Germany squad. As it happened VW never appeared in 2017, but Citroën had gone all-in by canning its official WRC effort in ’16 in favor of developing its all-new C3 WRC.
But the car proved to be a handful, and over the first seven events of 2017 Meeke scored points on just two of them – albeit one was victory in México.
Citroën then decided to bring Andreas Mikkelsen in for Poland in place of Meeke, citing a series of poor results and the need for Meeke to take a break and “recharge his batteries and release some of the pressure before Rally Finland”.
In later years Meeke has since said it was in fact his decision to sit Poland out, but either way this was a relationship that was not set to last. Following a crash in Portugal, Citroën unceremoniously sacked Meeke with immediate effect and he therefore missed the rest of the 2018 season.
He would return with Toyota the year after.
Adrien Fourmaux
Although M-Sport’s Frenchman is one of the WRC’s in-form drivers today, that was far from the case two years ago.
Impressing in his initial outings in 2021, Adrien Fourmaux was awarded a full-time drive in 2022 as the new Rally1 hybrid era was ushered in.
But a huge crash in Monte Carlo set the tone for what was an accident-strewn campaign for him. A shunt in Ypres, while sitting just a few seconds behind fourth-placed Oliver Solberg on the final day, was one too many for M-Sport and Fourmaux was made to miss the trip to Greece.
M-Sport cited damage to the car that could not be repaired in time, and Fourmaux then returned in Spain. But he also missed the trip to Japan, with M-Sport running cars for Craig Breen and Gus Greensmith only.
Fourmaux was stripped of any Rally1 responsibility in 2023, instead driving a Rally2 car, but has returned in fine form this season with four podiums to date.
