WRC '16 - Pondering Paddon...

I wrote this post at the end of Friday's action in Argentina. It's a draft, and before I had a chance to polish the wording a bit and stick a pic or two into the layout, events overtook the subject of the article.

In light of what eventually transpired, the predictive tone of the original has been lost a little - 20/20 hindsight could well have been applied, making the post irrelevant really. I had intended to shrug and delete it, but I decided, given how many others were seemingly thinking similar thoughts, to post it regardless.
I think maybe you'll enjoy it anyway...

Andy

The first full day of Rally Argentina is behind us and we're seeing trends forming, the most dominant being Volkswagen's consolidation of position at the head of the field. All three VW pilots are within the top five places.

This will come as no surprise at all to the reader, the sitution having a strongly familiar air about it. When was there a rally in the last three-and-a-bit years where VW's presence wasn't dominating the podium? Personally, I don't remember. But Rally Argentina may play itself out somewhat differently to the way it has in the past and has seemed almost destinued to continue to do.

And the instigating factor is the performance of Hyundai's Hayden Paddon.

For this round of the WRC, the Hyundai Motor Sport management team chose Dani Sordo and Thierry Neuville to compete for the #1 team, owing to their recent experience and greater familiarity with the event, the expectation being that the #1 team would benefit from the crews' potentially greater points-earning potential. The #2 team entry was of course Hayden Paddon, who would earn points for his Drivers' Championship aspirations and constructor points for the #2 team.

All good so far. But right from the beginning, starting at Shakedown in fact, it was apparent that the Kiwi was quicker than either Sordo or Neuville. This was a bit of a conundrum, showing as it did that the #1 team drivers, particularly Thierry Neuville, were underperforming relative to their less-fancied teammate. None of this was Hayden's fault of course - he was just doing his job as well as he was able - but the outcome of the shakedown experience was raising questions in many minds about why Paddon wasn't in the #1 team.

Of course, the answer to those who asked the question is two paragraphs back. I think such reasoning as exhibited there, used what has been called "the balance of probability". In some sense, it can be seen as the sane, safe option. If you were in the insurance business, you'd be familiar with the concept as that's one business that relies on that kind of reasoning.

In this case, it appears to be quite the wrong thing to do. Yet the decision probably seemed sound when after the first Super Special, SS1, Sordo held 1st place, Neuville 4th and Paddon 5th. But the first of Friday's "real" stages, SS2, saw Paddon take 2nd, Sordo took 3rd and Neuville 8th. Then in SS3, Paddon took 2nd, Sordo took 5th and Neuville 9th. SS4 finished with Paddon grabbing 2nd, again, Sordo capturing 5th and the hapless Neuville dropping to 24th.

The trend reversed itself on SS5, another Super Special, where Neuville scored the 1st placing, Paddon took 4th and Sordo 5th. (Paddon admits that his times on the short Super Special stages are not up to his standards and has pledged to improve them). But on SS6, Paddon made up for that previous under-performance by taking the stage win, Sordo snatching 4th and Neuville 6th.

The trend is clear, no doubt. The Hyundai driver with the best performance over the rally is the one guy that the the team had bypassed as a points-scoring member of the #1 team. Okay, being a team manager doesn't make you a clairvoyant, so we can cut the Hyundai chiefs some slack here, but now there is no reason to deny Hayden a role in the top team whenever there is a loose surface to compete on. His skills on gravel or dirt are evident to all, including the current World Champion Ogier and his VW boss Jost Capito.

So why not just swap Hayden and Neuville?

It's not that simple. If we look at the history of Hayden's arrival at Hyundai Motorsport GMBH, it certainly wasn't a case of the team simply recognising rallying genius and dragging him into the fold. The young Kiwi would not have been considered for the squad had it not been for the tireless efforts of the MD of Hyundai New Zealand and the Kiwi dealer network. And the break, when it finally came, was for a very limited number of rallies, in a team that was itself in a constant state of flux.

It's tempting to recall that Hayden's talents were instantly obvious and it was a no-brainer for Hyundai Motor Sport to get a contract under the New Zealander's nose immediately. But that would be to remember it very poorly indeed. The vein of golden ability that was present in Paddon was recognised only sporadically and the driver himself understood that it was woefully difficult to show, but he persevered, and eventually the team came to see the promise of the man.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team was refined, being reduced from a bunch of randomly selected (it seemed) candidates to its core of much-lauded lead driver Neuville, and the highly experienced Sordo. It was a major disappointment to Paddon's fans and backers that he didn't get the #2 driver position and Dani got his share of dissing over his selection to the squad, whether he knew it or not. But again, with Hyundai NZ's persuasion and his backers support, he won a trial set of events in a formed-for-the-purpose B team.

As the cliché has it, the rest is history. Sort of...

The highly-paid Neuville, as lead driver, has always expected to be the focus of Hyundai's efforts in the WRC. And as the team boss, Michel Nandan has always expected Thierry to perform at a level that justified the team's investment in the Belgian. But that's something that he has regularly failed to do, while Paddon, vastly less experienced, and much less expensive to run, has performed at a level that makes his senior teammate look very ordinary.

Obviously, that situation doesn't sit well with either Neuville or Paddon. In recent months though, the occasional bickering that spilled into the media has been less apparent, and with Hayden's three year contract and the teams widely publicised change from the lead driver model to a more horizontal team structure, Neuville no longer has seniority over Paddon.

So problem fixed?

Well, not exactly. The issue is that there are three drivers in the Hyundai WRC effort but only two spaces in the main team. Until the team is reduced to two drivers and a "spare" who is happy to lurk outside of the limelight in the Mobis B team, one of the three name drivers is likely to get their nose out of joint over some event that they feel they deserve to get an A team seat for, while management has other ideas.

To fix the problem will require one of those three name drivers to leave. And I don't think Michel Nandan will be happy anytime soon to lose the flexibility of his pik-n-mix horses-for-courses 3-driver resource. But it could be that Thierry's seemingly unending string of poor performances will make that difficult decision for him.

Each WRC team wants its own Sébastian Ogier clone. Not necessarily in personality or accent, but with the skills and commitment to achieve what the Frenchman has. Of course, there are few such superstar drivers on this planet, so the teams that aren't fortunate enough to have their own ready-made Seb Mk2 or Mk3 already, must make do with something close that has the promise of fulfilling the SebO job description, with a dollop of money and sweet words of encouragement.

Who are these Seb wannabes? I can think of three - Hayden Paddon, Kris Meeke and Jari-Matti Latvala. "Wannabes". That's not meant as a derogatory slur of the drivers so labelled. I simply mean that they have what it takes to be a world champion. Soon. Once they figure out how to stop Seb from becoming champion again. That's the secret here - it's not just being as good as Ogier, it's about making yourself better. That's a thought that should give you pause as a future world champion. You need to be an even better Seb than Ogier himself is.

And you need to do that immediately, because if you don't, and you wait around for the original Seb Ogier to be less good, you'll be beaten by some new up-and-coming driver who is getting better at an amazing rate. If that person sounds familiar, it's because he's threatening to win Rally Argentina today, tomorrow and Sunday.

His name is Hayden Paddon.