Mar
12
Matthew Wilson: Mad, bad, Mexico
Ok that’s me back to base in Cumbria from the second round of the WRC, Rally Mexico.
We got the week off to a great start before the rally even began when we took part in a charity run for Sport Relief on the Coca-Cola Street Stage in Leon. All the other Ford team members took part, from drivers to the likes of Ford’s Head of Motorsport in Europe Gerard Quinn and the guys who work behind the scenes in the service park. My co-driver Scott [Martin] won it and I came third, just behind Jari-Matti Latvala, so that shows all our hard work with our trainer produces results! It was great fun and more importantly it raised loads of money for a really good cause.
It has to be said that after that it didn’t entirely go to plan for myself and Scott.
We started well enough on Friday and, apart from the fact that all the Ford crews were struggling compared to the Citroens for some reason, things were going ok.
The first stage on Saturday morning was the longest and one of the most difficult of a tough rally, and it proved to a bad one for us as well as a few of the other WRC crews.
We had got through most of it and were only about 2km from the end when I misjudged the braking slightly on a corner and we ran wide and got beached on some big rocks. There was no real damage to the car and we could have recovered and got going again if it wasn’t for one really pointy boulder the car was stuck on. We tried to push it off and back onto the road but there weren’t any spectators nearby other than some young kids, who did try to help, so we just couldn’t budge it. That meant we had to retire and it was a pretty much the worst start to the day we could have had.
It was a simple driving error but in rallying one little thing like that is all it takes to end your event. It’s frustrating but it’s also part of the challenge that makes rallying so exciting. Dani Sordo and Ken Block were the others whose rally ended on that stage and they are top drivers, so unfortunately I was keeping good company! My team-mate Henning Solberg had a really good drive though and was probably the quickest out of all the Ford drivers, so that meant the Stobart M-Sport Ford rally team still had something to smile about at the end of the day.
We did go back out under SuperRally rules on Sunday just to get some more kilometres under our belts and test a few different things with the setup of the car. There were only three stages left so it there wasn’t much else we could do in that distance.
We had a very long team debrief after the rally, mainly to discuss why the Ford teams struggled compared to the Citroens. It looks like the main thing was the effect of the high-altitude of the stages on the power output, and it’s something that will be given a lot of consideration to make sure it doesn’t happen again in the future. I’ll be involved in helping to test out various solutions so the engineers can come up with a plan to solve it, which will be an interesting process.
Other than that it’s heads up and looking forward to the next WRC round in Jordan. I’ve not got too much on between now and then so we’ll be getting stuck into fitness training to make sure we can cope with the really high temperatures out there in the Middle East. Last year it got as high as 48 degrees Celsius, so you need to be really well prepared to be able to perform to your best.
I’ll update you on how things are going again once I get out there.
MW