The answer to the previous post is clear. Sweden didn't deliver the opportunity for Hayden Paddon to get his first win at the sport's highest level. Not that second place overall is anything to turn your nose up at. But it was a close-run thing and the World Champion was put under the kind of pressure he rarely experiences.
As discussed in that previous post, Sébastian held a substantial lead, 26.9 seconds actually, at the end of Friday's competition, but I made the argument that conditions forecast for the following day suggested that Paddon would pick up an advantage over the Frenchman, with more snow falling equalling a larger advantage.
Well, the predictions of 20cm of overnight snowfall turned out to be somewhat optimistic, and while the Kiwi's performance saw him move to within 8.8 seconds of Ogier (from a deficit of 32.4 seconds) in a single stage, the road conditions in general allowed the VW driver to to open his lead out to 17.1 seconds at close of the day's rallying. At this point, with just the 15.87km special stage scheduled for the final day, the chance of Hayden challenging for the podium's top step had gone.
However, it's interesting to muse over how it came to pass that Ogier was able to keep the determined Paddon at bay. The fact is, as Sébastian himself candidly admits, that the pressure from the flying Kiwi took its toll. At the finish line interview, the World Champion explained...
"Yesterday was a little bit too crazy and I took risks like I had never done in my life...”
It's not every day that Sébastian Ogier, an ice-cool technician behind the wheel, confesses to losing his composure. And as fan video from the stages, and in-car footage clearly demonstrate, the Frenchman also lost control of his Polo R WRC at least three times that day and he rode his luck to the very edge of catastrophe. There's a much-viewed in-car image of co-driver Julien Ingrassia's facial expression as the Polo careers at close to 190kph, completely sideways, in search of trees to hit.
If anyone tells you that the champ never really lost control or that his skill levels are so high that he made short work of each 'anomaly', then they need to tell that to both Julien and Seb. That facial expression captures forever a study in the anticipation of impending disaster.
Yet it's not the fact that Sébastian took risks. Or even big risks. Rally drivers at this level do that as a matter of course on every rally. It's the fact that the VW #1 was forced to take risks that even he knew were crazy in order to keep his young challenger at bay. A few centimetres or milliseconds difference here or there could quite conceivably have resulted in the total destruction of their car or worse. Much worse.
That didn't happen, of course, and Ogier's gamble paid off. By taking the "crazy" risks he did, he doubled his margin over Paddon's NGi20 and effectively put the top step of the podium beyond reach of the Hyundai crew. Paddon had briefly entertained the thought of pushing for the win, and at 8.8 seconds in arrears it was still within the realm of possibility, but 17.1 seconds was out of the question. We're talking about getting better than a second a kilometre from a three-times world champion here, and that would never be likely.
So Hayden settled for keeping his buffer back to Mads Ostberg intact (he increased it very slightly, 0.6 seconds as it happens) and the dream of a maiden victory vanished. Actually, the dream was ours more than it was ever Hayden's, for as much as he would have loved such an outcome, the well-grounded Kiwi knew that he would need Sébastian to make an error for the dream to become reality. And with Ogier's track record, the likelihood of that was next to zero.
At the end of the day, Hayden and John can be very pleased with the outcome. Thierry Neuville's transmission woes on day #1 of the rally dropped the Belgian so far down the order that he was never likely to score any points for Hyundai's main team, so the burden of that responsibility fell on the shoulders of the #2 driver Paddon. His outstanding performance over the weekend has kept the team in the hunt for the constructor championship, trailing VW by just 5 points after two rounds.
That he has become the first driver from outside of Europe to gain a podium position on Rallye Sweden is something unique in his CV, and it can never be taken from him. Paddon continues to improve with each rally he completes, his speed increases and his reputation as a future world champion continues to grow. Yet with all that, he appears to be completely unaffected by his position, his successes and his prospects.
Mr Paddon, you're a legend.
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