WRC '14 - Echoes from Poland

WRC Poland is done and dusted. Ogier won. Mikkelsen was runner up. And Neuville filled the final podium spot. You could likely have predicted that before the event began, and actually, it's fair to say that many did. But it doesn't mean the event was boring - far from it. It simply recognises that VW still retains the supremacy over its competitors currently.

Despite Ogier's healthy victory margin, it might have ended quite differently had his 'moment' early on SS12 not had the sprinkling of luck that it did. “I had a scare in the first sixth-gear corner,” Ogier reported at stage end.

A few centimetres of car placement left or right would have seen the reigning champ doing serious harm to both his car and his chances. Other competitors had similar moments during the event but their luck was of an entirely different stripe. And they paid a price for their moment that Seb did not.

There's always a tendency to ascribe good luck to some superior driving ability, the old "The harder I practice, the luckier I get" school of thought, but clearly sometimes the margins of disaster-to-happy-outcome are so fine as to be humanly impossible to negotiate. And so it was in Poland.

What isn't obvious from those overall placings is how very possible a different result could have been, and how the VW hegemony is not as strong as it was.

So the landscape of the championship has shifted almost imperceptibly away from VW and it's ace Ogier, towards the likes of Mikkelsen, Latvala, Neuville, Meeke, Hirvonen and Hanninen. And while they may not have been immediately apparent in Poland, there are subtle signs. Finland is likely to be the first real evidence that the sea-change is underway. I predict that the winner in Finland will be neither Ogier nor VW. The WRC is getting very interesting.

On the subject of landscape, Poland showed up a flaw in the championship that may have consequences beyond the event itself. With the Polish stages, the event included Lithuanian roads. There's no official explanation for why, and it could be that Poland simply didn't have enough stage miles available, and the excursion across the border made the event physically possible. But that seems highly unlikely and the inclusion of Lithuanian roads was probably a commercial decision.

Whichever, it transpires that it was a terrible error for the rally. Even the first pass of the cars through the first stage uncovered a serious problem with the construction of the roads, the surface degrading unacceptably quickly to the point that by the sixth or seventh car through any section, the ruts exposed made tramlining the only option. Not a terrific way to showcase the WRC as a motorsport spectacle.

The same issue arose on the second Lithuanian stage, making passage through the test an exercise in frustration for the drivers - especially after the first half dozen cars had passed. The event organisers had no option other than to accept the gravity of the situation and they cancelled the repeat running of both tests.

A serious amount of time and road miles for not much benefit to the teams or the spectators.

Remember that this was not the result of force majeure - it was the conscious decision by the organisers to include what must have been clearly inappropriate roads on their event. Not a WRC round promoter's finest hour.

It seems that decisions to include 'new' events in the calendar are not attracting the scrutiny that they should (the first WRC round in Poland since 2009 and mostly new roads). If such a situation arose in, for example, New Zealand, you can bet that the screams from various motorsport representatives in European capitals to exclude the event in future would be heard loud and long - probably for years.

On the good side of the ledger, the Polish stages were seen by the drivers and teams (and perhaps more importantly, the many thousands of spectators and fans) as demanding and exciting. That bodes well for the round remaining in the championship for the foreseeable future. Just keep it all in Poland thanks.