Despite road-sweeping duties over the loose stuff on Friday and Saturday being a prescription for a torrid time for the World Rally Champion, nothing could be further from the way events transpired, thanks to the help provided by his top-tier competitors. It isn't as if SebO needs the help - far from it. His skills and his luck are legendary. So the results in Mexico were astonishing by any measure.
So what happened? And why?
Really, it can be summed up by the start order on Saturday. Instead of having to clean the course on the morning loop, Ogier was back in 8th starting slot instead. In front of the Frenchman were a sorry band of road-sweepers, paying pennance for their peccadillos of the previous day.
1: Ott Tanak
2; Hayden Paddon
3: Robert Kubica
4: Kris Meeke
5: Lorenzo Bertelli
6: Thierry Neuville
7: Benito Guerra
At least two of those drivers were considered possibles to fight for the top step of the podium so Sebastién would have been feeling quite optimistic about the rally from that point forward. He had finished the Thursday evening publicity stages with a 1.2 second lead to take into the first proper day's rallying, not a significant lead and with the sweeping ahead of him, he would have been justified in expecting to trail the first loop by up to half a minute.
Nope.
Instead, the World Champion led by 9.6 seconds over Thierry Neuville, and 24.4 seconds in front of eventual second-placed finisher, Mads ostberg. Now we knew that Ogier would push in order to minimise his road-sweeping time losses, but no way should he have been in first place at the finish of the morning loop. His competition simply failed to fire.
Paddon, Meeke, Kubica and Tanak had all fallen foul of El Chocolate, Tanak's roll into the lake being quite the judge's favourite for Best Prang For No Good Reason on the entire rally. That he managed to Rally 2 and complete the event with a constructor's point seems utterly improbable. Hollywood couldn't come up with a more fanciful script.
On the third stage of Friday's morning loop, Neuville gave his i20 the welly and took 4.4 seconds back off Ogier which gave the fans some heart and a faint whiff of an upset of VW's and Ogier's hegemony on the championship, and the Belgian trailed by just 9.6 seconds heading to service.
But of course, it was all too good to be true - on the second running of the formidable El Chocolate, Thierry smacked up his i20 and joined the other miscreants in the naughty drivers bin, handing second place to Jari-Matti Latvala who was some 12.1 seconds behind his French teammate. At close of the day's competitive stages, Ogier had increased the gap back to Latvala to 13.5 seconds - not an insurmountable lead by any means, and J-ML was feeling more confident in his Polo.
So Saturday was looking to be a big battle between the WRC's fastest two drivers.
The first stage confirmed the Finn's ambition for the event, his time loss to Ogier a mere 0.2 of a second. Road sweeping was not impacting on the stage times of the VW teammates, and the fight was most certainly on. Until on the following stage, Jari-Matti ripped the rear suspension of his Polo out and he was forced to retire. Battle over, and with a 50+ second gap back to the new second-place holder Mads Ostberg, the rally was effectively won a day early.
It's tragic that such a group of skilled drivers should simply put their hands up in surrender to Monsieur Ogier. Having a fight to the finish, even if the Frenchman won again, is preferable to capitulating a whole day prior to the actual rally end. The fans deserve better than this, and it's a sad state of affairs when you begin to wish misfortune upon a deserving World Champion just so that his hold on the championship is broken. Yet that's what it's coming down to in the apparent absence of real competition to the hat-trick-winning Sebastién Ogier.
And that's a darned shame.
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