Judging by the surfeit of rally blogs chattering away on the interwebs, there really isn't much excuse for another so it's lucky that I can excuse EchoCentrix by protesting that I write about other stuff as well. Which you may have noticed if you've been reading it since it kicked off in March.
It was never my intention to write about rallies at all, as it happens, this being my outlet to blather about stuff that isn't related to technology and gadgets. So it's been something of a surprise to discover that an increasing volume of folks have been reading these posts. A big thank you for that. It really makes a difference to one's motivation when it's understood that there's actually an audience for the written ramblings.
Readership has also increased by region and somewhat surprisingly perhaps, the USA is the second greatest source after little old New Zealand. In no particular order, the rest are:
UK
France
Poland
Ukraine
Ireland
Australia
Germany
France
Russia
Canada
Sth Korea
and Turkey
You know who you are...
;-)
EchoCentrix isn't monetised in any way. I publish it for the same reasons that millions of others have - they just want to offer a perspective that's missing elsewhere, or they feel the urge to share their opinions to a wider audience than the dog or the long-suffering partner, something which wouldn't be possible in any other way. Same here. At heart, I'm an analyst of sorts. And it's that part of my personality that drives me to share my thoughts via this blog. So this preamble is just to reiterate that fact. Moving right along...
WRC 2014 turned out to be way more interesting and exciting than I foresaw at the close of 2013. I really wasn't that interested in the championship at the beginning of the '14 season, expecting that it was all a foregone conclusion. And really, if all you looked at were just the final results after Rally Wales Great Britain, then your outtake would be "I told you so", but the way the season played out belied the end results.
As the season got underway, much was made as usual by the motorsport press about Sebastien Ogier's superiority as a driver and of the VW Golf R WRC as a weapon. That the latter seems to be true can surely be argued, but the former turned out to be premature. The fly in the ointment for M. Ogier was the resurgence of his teammate Jari-Matti Latvala. He brought a new mental positivity and a bucket-load of skill to the fight, and unlike the 2013 season, put the WRC Champion under pressure, something that the Frenchman, it turned out, wasn't comfortable with at all.
Not that you'd notice by reading the motorsport press, where it was all assumptions that SebO's superior driving skills would ensure he'd clean J-ML's clock again. Even when the signs were visible that this would be a whole different game, the motorsport writers ignored them. It seems that they just weren't paying attention, trotting out the same old praise for Seb even when the cracks were clearly showing as early as Rally Sweden in February where Jari-Matti enjoyed his first victory in 2014.
My first WRC post had nothing whatsoever to do with Seb and Jari-Matti - I was fascinated by the performance of Robert Kubica, ex-F1 driver and then-current WRC2 Champion. Here was a driver, undoubtedly quick and skilled, whose performances to that point had been littered with excellence, but were ultimately undermined with errors. An odd mix for a competitor who had performed consistently well the previous year. What was going on there?
While the rally literati were simply writing the Polish pilot off as being unlucky or jinxed in some way, if you read the reports it was clear that RK was plenty quick but now in a WRC car, was arriving at corners too quickly to get round them, inevitably leading to an unrecoverable situation which in turn led to an off. The in-car footage, had the rally writers cared to view it, showed that the pacenotes weren't in sync with the car's progress, hence the "tinkle-bonk" moments.
So I decided to say what others wouldn't or weren't aware of and my first WRC blog appeared. Surprisingly, it drew some traffic and encouraged me to share more. Any regular reader will know that Kubica's Korner has become a staple of EchoCentrix rally posts since. But back to the season wrap-up...
By Rally Finland, Ogier had won five events but Latvala had won three and the Frenchman's invincibility was clearly less than assured by this time. I blogged about that, mainly in frustration that Seb was still constantly lauded as being in a class of his own, when Latvala was demonstrating that he was as fast, if not faster, than his teammate. That post has the second most hits of any I have published. In some modest way, it seemed to have wiped away some of the fog of complacency that was indulged in by the motoring press.
Germany forever destroyed the myth that Ogier was an iceman, unflappable and possessed of skills no other WRC driver has. And it showed that Seb had previously enjoyed more than his fair share of luck in amassing his points total up to then. Neither he nor teammate Latvala scored a point in Germany, but the real eye-opener was that suddenly the rally press realised what they should have noticed months earlier - Seb was not the immaculate driver they'd assumed - the World Champ was fallible after all.
Of the four rallies that remained in the season, Latvala won only a single round - Ogier won the other three. A win is a win, as they say, and Ogier's performance over the year was outstanding by any measure. What the results don't show though, is the sheer speed that Latvala was able to bring to the fight. Small mistakes cost him dearly, and as the competitor playing catch-up for most of the season, success demanded that he be the one to make the pace while for the most part Sebastien had the luxury of reacting.
In 2015, we will see an even more committed Latvala compete with a not quite so confident Ogier. It'll be a titanic battle for ascendancy, one which rages for all thirteen rounds irrespective of where they sit on the championship ladder.
I can't wait.
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