Raikkonen's Progress

Just a few days after Renault team principal Eric Boullier admitted that he had been approached by Kimi Raikkonen's management team regarding a seat with the team in 2011, the Finn took his first ever outright rally win last weekend. Now it was nothing to get too excited by - the Rallye Vosgien is an amateur affair, and anyone who knows roughly what he is doing shouldn't have too much trouble winning it if they have a works Citroen WRC at their disposal. But winning the event was, to be fair, not really the point. The rally was held in the countryside surrounding Strasbourg - the same part of the world in which the forthcoming Rallye France will take place. With the Citroen Junior Team having used up all 15 of its allotted test days for the year, this was the best way to provide the still inexperienced Raikkonen with some asphalt mileage ahead of the event.

After the best part of a year on the stages, though, how is Kimi's second career in rallying going? It all rather depends on what your expectations were. Some of the more excitable elements of the motorsports press seemed to think that he might be in the running for podiums on asphalt by the end of the year - and that is looking very unlikely. This, though, always struck me as something of a long shot. Rallying is really quite different to circuit racing, and but for a couple of outings in a Fiat Punto S2000 last year, the 2007 F1 World Champion had no real experience of the stages before this season. If David Coulthard and Ralf Schumacher have struggled adapting to DTM tin-tops, Raikkonen has faced an altogether tougher challenge. It's a little like the difference between a grass court specialist tennis player playing on clay, and a tennis pro being handed a badminton racket and trying to win the world title, if you will.

Let's not forget that Sebastien Loeb didn't find things any easier when he tried to go the other way. He might have looked impressive in testing for Toro Rosso and Red Bull a couple of years back, but it's always hard to know how much to read into testing times - a light fuel load and a new set of tyres can make any driver who knows roughly what they are doing look quick. When Loeb tested a GP2 car against the rest of the GP2 field last year (reportedly as a prelude to an aborted race debut with Toro Rosso at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix) he was last and two seconds off the pace. Not so slow as to be embarrassing, but equally, it was clear that he was no match for circuit drivers who have spent years doing nothing else. And if you were going to pick one rally driver out as having the kind of style that might translate to the circuit, it would be the ultra-precise Sebastien Loeb.

With his first points finish, for 8th, in Jordan, Raikkonen became only the second driver in history to score points in both the World Rally Championship and the Formula 1 World Championship. He's got a little way before he matches Carlos Reutemann's podium finish in a Peugeot 205 T16 on the 1985 Argentine Rally, but it's worth bearing in mind that the Argentine former F1 driver finished a whole half hour behind the winner. That said, had the World Rally Championship existed in the late 60s, all-rounder Vic Elford would have got in there first, he did win the Monte Carlo Rally in 1968 and scored a handful of F1 points finishes.

Both Raikkonen's points finishes and Reutemann's podium point to a fundamental difference between World Championship rallying and Formula 1. Aside from a few front runners, there is not typically the same strength in depth in a WRC event that there is at a Grand Prix. At the moment, there are perhaps as few as six really fast serious professionals competing full time in the WRC: Sebastien Loeb, Dani Sordo, Sebastien Ogier, Petter Solberg, Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala. Behind them are a clutch of competent, experienced paying amateurs and semi-professionals: Federico Villagra, Matthew Wilson (there mainly because his father runs the Ford team), Henning Solberg, Mads Ostberg et cetera. It is as if, in Formula 1, behind the front runners like Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Kubica et al, the rest of the field was made up of a bunch of also-rans from the back half of the current GP2 and Renault World Series fields who happened to have the cash to pay for the ride.

It's always been true to some extent of rallying, but with only two manufacturers in the sport at the present, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is little strength in depth in the WRC at the moment. And it's hard to know what to make of the fact that Raikkonen has generally been able, just about to hang on to the back of this group in recent rallies. A sign that he's learning quickly, or merely that he's being flattered by a weak WRC field? Only in Bulgaria, where the Fords seemed to be really struggling, was Raikkonen trading times with the likes of Latvala and Hirvonen, rather than Wilson and Villagra.

I do rather wonder whether, by jumping straight into a WRC machine for a full season, Raikkonen is trying to run before he can walk. He might perhaps have learned more by spending a low key year in the Intercontinental Rally Challenge , learning his new trade at the wheel of something a little less powerful, away from the public eye. It's not as if the WRC is entirely devoid of talent either, with many of the drivers who might ten years ago have led one of the lesser manufacturer teams instead to be found there: Jan Kopecky, Kris Meeke, Juho Hanninen and, on occasion, fellow ex-F1 racer Stephane Sarrazin.

As it is, I'm beginning to wonder whether he has hit something of a brick wall - if after picking up the basics in winter testing, he's no longer really able to improve his game. Certainly, it does not appear, looking at his stage times, that he's really going any quicker than he was at the beginning of the season. His times tend to ebb and flow from around 2 to as much as 7% off the ultimate pace, just as they did on the opening rally in Sweden back in February. It's as if the car and the very different events - what, after all, does what a driver learns in Sweden do to help him in Jordan, or in Bulgaria and Japan - mean that he's not really able to learn much. Maybe it's expecting too much of him too soon - and we should be thinking in terms of a multi-year programme in which the results only really begin to come in his second or third season. After all, it took drivers like Solberg and Hirvonen some time to really get onto the pace, and for all that Raikkonen seems to have had a lot of accidents this year, I don't think he's actually had as many as Colin McRae did in his first full year in the WRC.

But is Raikkonen, who has, after all, come from an F1 world in which he was a champion and one of the recognised top drivers, patient enough to spend several seasons learning the black arts of rallying when he's already given over more than a decade of his life to perfecting the art of circuit racing? And even if he does intend to, when the novelty factor wears off, will Citroen and Red Bull be particularly interested in paying for him to do so? That just might be what is behind the rather unexpected noises about Raikkonen and Renault. For the reasons Joe Saward outlined in a perceptive article on his blog last week, I'm not convinced such a deal would make much sense for either Raikkonen or Renault. Renault can rely on Kubica for the inspired pace, and would perhaps be better served by a cheap, competent number 2 (Nick Heidfeld springs to mind) while Raikkonen looked washed up at the end of 2009 and if received wisdom is to be believed, was not overly enamoured of F1 life anyway.

So I hope he stays for another year, at least, in the World Rally Championship. I suspect that, with Sebastien Ogier doing everything to mark himself out as the new Sebastien Loeb at the moment, he will never reach the very pinnacle of rallying. He might have had the innate talent, but I suspect that a man trying to learn what is in a sense an entirely new sport at the age of 31 will never be able to reach quite the same level as someone who has been doing it since his teens. But given time, he might get close. I doubt he will ever go on to be the first man to win the World Rally Championship and the F1 World Championship, but he just might manage to be the first man to win both a WRC event and a Grand Prix. Which would surely be a more worthwhile aim than going back to an F1 world which has moved on in his absence.

Stage-side

At first, you hear only the distant sound of a car engine, straining against its rev-limiter like a dog against its leash, interleaved with the low crackle of the exhaust on the over-run. For a minute or two it echoes across the valley, but doesn't seem to be getting any louder, any closer. Then, suddenly, it appears. Rear end fish-tailing slightly as the tyres struggle for purchase on the damp tarmac, it rounds the tight 90 degree left-hander and its barreling straight towards you, at an ever increasing velocity. Building from 30mph to nearer 100 in the space of a few seconds. Then just as it seems its never going to slow down, that a tonne or more of Mitsubishi Lancer Evo. 10 rally car is going to come ploughing straight on through the barbed-wire fence and make mince-meat of you, the driver jams the brakes, the front of the car dips under the force being applied, and the car is pitched into an elegant four-wheel drift through the left-hander you are standing on the outside of, tearing up a chunk of turf from the inside verge as he goes. And then he's on his way again, banging back up through the gears, the sound of the engine becoming steadily fainter as he disappears down the narrow sing;e-track road, into the distance. There'll be another one along in a minute...



I struggle to think of any other sport where a spectator, watching the event live and in person, has less insight into what is actually happening, less idea of who is in the fight for victory and who has little chance of winning, than in the case with rallying. On each stage, you see the cars for just a few seconds, and perhaps two or three corners at the most. Even if you have an intuitive feel for their pace over those two or three corners, you cannot know whether it's representative of their performance over the stage as a whole, which might be fifteen miles long, and consist of hundreds of corners. Watching the penultimate stage of the Jim Clark Rally last weekend, I had literally no idea who was in contention for the win, and who was minutes or more off the leader's pace, with no realistic chance of victory. I had no idea, until I got back to the ceremonial finish area in the village of Duns, that Gwyndaf Evans, a man whom I remember seeing in action in a lurid-pink coloured Sierra RS Cosworth in the late 1980s, had finally broken his Jim Clark Rally duck and won the event in his Mitsubishi Lancer.



So why did I bother to make the trip? And more to the point, why was I joined by what I would guess, based on the evidence of a single stage (Wedderburn, in case you're curious), was a larger crowd than any other motorsport event in Scotland bar the BTCC and British Superbike rounds at Knockhill? The answer, in short, is that there is no other form of motorsport that has such an immediate, visceral, visual impact - that lets you get so close to the action, and which is so obviously a challenge for the driver. It may be every bit as difficult to get a really good time out of a low-powered single-seater but it doesn't look half as much of a challenge as getting the quickest possible time out of a 300BHP rally car on a damp single-track road on cut slick tyres. And 80 or 90mph might look very pedestrian on the wide open expanses of Silverstone, but it looks pretty bloody hair-raising on a narrow, pot-holed country lane with an eight foot stone wall on one side and a ditch on the other.

One thing that did surprise me though, was how much more entertaining the National-class event that ran behind the British Rally Championship counter that was the main event. While the main event was contested by Group N and Super 2000 cars (though the only competitive Super 2000 car, Craig Breen's Fiesta, had gone out of the event by the time I was watching), the National event seemed to serve as a kind of graveyard for top-line rally cars from the past thirty years. Damian Cole won that event in an ex M-Sport Focus WRC, but he was pushed all the way by Simon Mauger in, of all things, a Mk. 2 Escort which was far and away the most spectacular car through the bit of the Wedderburn stage I saw, the combination of rear wheel drive, a thirty year old chassis and bundles of horsepower on a by then rather wet surface looking a real handful.



Even if the cars hadn't been as spectacular as they were, there was something very refreshing about the sheer variety of the machinery. Rather than endless Subaru Imprezas and Mitsubishi Lancers, there was a Focus WRC, a Skoda Fabia WRC, several very quick Mk. 2 Escorts and, yes, a lot of Mitsubishis and Subarus. There was even an ersatz Metro 6R4 (though it had been entered into a previous rally as a 'Metro 4R2', reflecting the fact that it was in 2WD and had a 4 cylinder engine.) I appreciate that such an approach could hardly be expected to work in the big-money world of the World Rally Championship, where such open and free technical regulations would soon get out of hand. But if the people running the WRC really want to reconnect with fans, to create a real spectacle, how about mandating rear wheel drive?



(All photographs author's own.)