Half Monte

The Rallye Monte-Carlo, to give it its official name, is a classic. Sure, it’s had years in the IRC wilderness, but the Monte, as everybody in Europe calls it, is one of the pillars of the World Rally Championship and has been for years.

It’s been the scene of drama, such as Ari Vatanen pulling back eight minutes after a navigational error to win against the might of Audi in 1985. Like Walter Rohrl winning in his first event with Audi in 1984, despite claiming every second corner went wrong. And there are classics like the 2014 edition…

This year was my first Monte. I’ve bounced around a few WRC events, some classics, some not. I’ve been to Rally GB, I’ve been honoured to be shown around the Thousand Lakes Rally (some of us can’t bear to call it Rally Finland) by Hannu Mikkola, I’ve taken in Spain and Sardegna and commandeered an emptied hotel room in Trier to watch the end of Rally Germany. And, of course, a few Rally Australias and Rally New Zealands have been tossed in there, too.

My plan this year was to rush back from the Detroit motor show to meet up with the Hyundai Shell World Rally Team for its comeback rally in the WRC at the Monte, hosted by Hyundai Australia’s intrepid Bill Thomas and his sidekick, Guido Schenken, plus Hyundai’s designated gravel WRC driver and former Monaco resident, Chris Atkinson.

But between Detroit and the Monte, I had to trip through Las Vegas (to test the BMW M235i and 435i Convertible), then Washington and Frankfurt before dropping in on Marseilles.

That landed me within cooee of the rally on Friday morning, but the Monte unusually begins on Thursday. Every sporting event in Monte Carlo has its quirks. The Formula One race, for example, is the only one to have practice on Thursday and a rest day on Friday.

But I found a problem. Between when I boarded the plane in Vegas and when I landed in France, the Monte Carlo efforts of the two factory Hyundais were over.

Team leader Thierry Neuville, in his first full factory drive, departed ignominiously after misjudging a bend by about 30km/h, desperately trying to win Hyundai’s first rally on the first day.

Hyundai’s designated tarmac guy, Dani Sordo, drove more sensibly, running as high as second before his engine refused to start after a standard front-to-rear tyre swap. After towing it back to the service park, Hyundai re-fired it no less than six times before turning to throw Please Explain stares at the Magnetti Marelli people.

No problem, my guide and former Toyota Team Europe team manger George Donaldson explained. The boys are out spectating and we’ll just meet up with them for the Sisteron stage. Awesome.

If you’ve had anything to do with rallying, you know a handful of stage names from around the world by heart: Ouninpoja in Finland is one, El Condor in Argentina is another, and Fafe in Portugal another. The Monte has two such stages: the Col di Turini and Sisteron. And George had kindly organised for the chopper to land in an inaccessible place that let us see a couple of kilometres of winding, sinuous mountain road.

So I piled my jetlagged body into an i40, threw the cruise control on 130km/h and headed to the airfield where the chopper would be waiting.

A couple of hours and a couple of hundred kilometres later, George called Denis Giraudet, a former WRC co-driver for world champion Didier Auriol, who was in charge of the chopper. And Denis broke the bad news. For reasons I’ve still yet to fathom, they’d decided against going to Sisterol and were taking the chopper back to Monaco.

Beside me, George exploded. “But we’re at the end of the freeway and at the airfield now! They have to dust off here anyway! It’s sunny on top of Sisteron! We can see it from here! It’s the jewel in the whole program!”

But the best they offered us was that we were free to drive as close as we could to the start of the stage, which was about to start, and walk in. Twelve kilometres in. Err, no thank you.

So, in frustration, we turned around, found a cute French village not far from Sebastien Ogier’s hometown of Gap and settled in for lunch, my eyelids drooping, George’s raised in outrage.

“Sisteron! The best stage in the bloody rally! Why aren’t we going there? They had to fly past us anyway to get there!”

It mattered not, the die was cast and I gave up, telling George to head back to Monaco. By the time we got there, I’d spent 22 hours in transit and the only rally car I’d seen was crooked on the back of a flatbed.

It got worse, because as the exhaustion set in, I realised I could have flown to Nice instead of Marseilles, which would have left me 20 minutes from my hotel room instead of a seven-hour round-trip to almost see rally action.

So we did what you’re supposed to do when all else fails. We had a drink. Atkinson, who knows Monaco like the native he once was, pokes us through short cuts, pointing out where certain sports celebs live, where (name deleted) was arrested, etcetera.

While a cone of silence exists, suffice to say that in Monaco, unlike otherplaces, you can order bottles of vodka to your table so you can pour your own drinks and don’t suffer through ridiculous tiny nips. As many bottles as you like, in fact.

In the normal way of things on modern WRC rallies, the final day of the Monte was Saturday (can’t get used to it, still don’t like it), with a ceremonial presentation day on Sunday (a pretention, at best). So before all of that was over, the Hyundai folks determined that I’d better actually see a rally car of some sort before the weekend finished.

So it was off to the mountains, perched in the back seat of a Santa Fe as Paul Gover argued with his old mate Donaldson about the best ways to negotiate around the Monte’s myriad of road closures, with Donaldson inevitably being right and Gover conceding ground grudgingly, with as many verbal thrusts as defensive parries.

And then, after plopping through puddles, washed out bits of gravel and drops only a hand glider would enjoy, we turned up at a restaurant atop a mountain pass. And it’s familiar. It’s familiar because I’ve been here many, many times on car launches and it’s perfect. Normally.

Normally, it sits astride a small saddle between mountain peaks, reached by a long, slow climb up one side and a sharper, hairpin-drenched climb up the other side. Back in the early days of motoring, places like this were essential to rest weary radiators. Today, it’s essential to warm frozen, saturated bones. There is no snow, just water. Deep, deep water and it’s still falling.

Hyundai has pride of place here, in a prime location. There is the restaurant itself reserved for Hyundai’s people, there is a roped off spectating area (on what would typically be described as a nice lawn, but is more like a swamp today). Down the hill is a Volkswagen marquee, with Red Bull signage flapping in the not-inconsiderable breeze. While VW is winning the rally, Hyundai has clearly won the spectator point for the day.

If you’ve never seen full-house works rally cars on treacherous wet tarmac, you’ve never seen proper car control in action. Our vantage point gives us more than a dozen corners, including a hairpin in each direction, a fast double-apex bend, a couple of quicker kinks and a tricky, tight downhill left-hander.

And though we had to walk a full 25 paces to catch that last one, we then got to see them disappearing down the mountain for another full mile.

And then you hear them, all 1.6 litres of snorting 450Nm four-pot, all with their own distinct tones. The horde of Malcolm Wilson Ford Fiestas, the richer-sounding Citroens and the wastegate chatter of the Volkswagen Polos. Don’t ask me what the Hyundais sound like. I’ve no idea yet.

We hear them a full minute before we see them as they climb back and forward, zig-zagging up the mountain, then one by one they fizz and bellow and skate past us, sliding back noisily into the fog.

The confident, like Frenchman Bryan Bouffier, tackle the hairpins fluidly, all late braking, a touch of the handbrake and gone again with just enough slip angle. The best of them, like Andreas Mikkelson, carry one long drift through the double-apex fourth-gear bend. The bravest, like Kris Meeke, seem to scrape the bumpers on the rocks so gently they don’t leave a scar.

And the very best, Ogier, does all of them in one seamless, fluid, almost languid motion through the entire section of saturated, bumpy blacktop. And only Ogier grabs every last millimetre of the last downhill left and explodes out of the corner without a trace of unnecessary sliding, with the Polo crackling and screaming down the mountain.

And that, from what I could gather in my limited time actually watching this year’s Monte, is why he’s world champion.

See WRC Monte Carlo photo gallery at www.motoring.com.au

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