Rally Argentina / Round-up
17/44
Citroën
RK M-Sport World Wally Team
Meeke’s the man again! They must
have thought at Citroën. After having
scored one point in the last three rallies
he is now back on the podium again. In
Argentina he learned a valuable lesson, one he must have membered form
Monte Carlo. Go as slowly as you can
to get the results! Normally the Northern Irishman has only one modus and
that is going as fast as I can. Unfortunately on several occasions he proved
that that was faster than he actually
could in that situation.
Mechanics can do wonders on a car,
but the ‘human mechanic’ (in this case
the physiotherapist of the Citroën
team) could not do anything else than
to tape in Mads Østberg’s thumb, injured in the early crash. He did restart
but had to throw the towel at the end of
he day.
“I’m still learning to walk,” Robert Kubica must have thought. Or did someone tell him? Anyway before reaching
running speed, he still has to come to
grips with a World Rallycar and in Argentina he did. It was his first rally in
such a car that he did not crash. Both
he and we think he can go faster, but
we said it before and it may seem not
too original but to finish first, you first
have to finish. That is especially appropriate to Kubica. He now reached
the end of a rally, he has to do that
some more and then the next step
can be to finish first. We think Poland
is a bit too close for that, but hey why
not? A home win would be nice for local publicity.
Hyundai
Thierry Neuville again
proved his value for
the team and proposed
some changes in the
settings of the i20 that
made he car much more
drivable. But both he and
Dani Sordo had a host
of other problems making it impossible for them
to score big points. But,
we keep on saying it this
year: Hyundai is already
fast, now they ‘only’
need to become reliable.
It cost Volkswagen a
year of testing out of the
limelight. Hyundai are
doing it on centre stage
for everyone to see. That
is a choice they made
and for us it gives us a
chance to see how complicated it is to build a
fully-fledged World Rallycar from scratch. From
what we saw until now
we have every confidence they will succeed.