Driving a full works WRC rally car with Sébastien Loeb | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

And without it, I’d never have stumbled across the pictures you see here, so would never be able to illustrate the story of the day I was shown by Sébastien Loeb how to drive a full works spec WRC rally car.

It was September 17^th 2009, and the precise date is significant – at least to me – for it was also the date of Stirling’s 80^th birthday, in celebration of which the Duke of Richmond, then Earl of March, had kindly organised a very small dinner party in Goodwood House to which I was honoured to be invited. So, I flew down to the south of France thinking not at all about rally cars or the greatest rally driver ever born whom I was about to meet, but praying I’d not miss my return flight, nor that it would be delayed and I’d miss dinner. I didn’t, it wasn’t and a fine time we all had. But that’s another story.

It seems so silly now. I am not, nor have I ever been, a rabid rallyista, if that is even a term. I’ve driven a few rally cars, stood in a few forests, watched a bit on telly, but perhaps because there is no overtaking involved it’s never really resonated with me. Also, I knew Loeb’s reputation for being difficult, which was immediately enhanced when the assembled journalists sat with him around a table and tried to get him to answer questions with more than one sentence of monosyllabic nothingness.

It was then my turn to drive on my own, after which he’d drive me and show me how it was really done. Perhaps, thought I, if I showed him what a driving god I really was, the Loeb facade would crack to reveal the real human Sébastien behind. So I drove his C4 WRC as fast as I possibly could. I found it far easier to control than I’d imagined, so I spent my laps of the short gravel stage doing lurid slides, especially at places where I thought there might be a chance that Loeb was watching.

He was there when I got back, and he was either dumb with awe at my exploits, or singularly unimpressed or simply hadn’t bothered looking. I never did find out which, but the taciturn demeanour was unchanged as I was strapped into the passenger seat and he took the helm, engaged anti-lag, and blasted off into the forest.

And then something quite curious happened. I became aware I was witnessing something I couldn’t understand. I’ve been driven by reasonable number of F1 drivers around tracks, and while I might at any given time be utterly amazed by their talent, I always understood what they were doing, even if I knew there was no way I could do it myself. But this was different: there were times when Loeb’s feet and hand movements appeared to bear no relation to what the car was doing: it simply didn’t compute.  

And it is fair to say it elicited a rather strange reaction from me, one manifestation of which being that I was unaware of it until we were parked back at base, looked across to Loeb and saw, to my stark, staring astonishment that he was grinning like a Cheshire cat. This I had not expected. So I asked, and he explained that shortly into the run I had started to laugh and not stopped until the end. “You will see,” he said, “on the film.” At which point I remembered the small camera mounted, pointed straight at us.

Watching it back, I saw my face transform from fairly impassive, to faintly terrified to cackling loon. But that’s not what interested me, because I could see Sébastien’s face too, and watched it become infected with that same compulsion. Whatever it was I was finding funny was clearly so funny that, to him, the act of me finding it that funny was funny all by itself. And by the end of it we were both giggling away like schoolchildren, me at his otherworldly car control and him at, well, me.  

Sébastien was fine after that, at least with me. We sat in the car, cocooned from the outside world and I chatted to a man so animated and engaged it seemed like he could not even be related to the automaton I had met earlier, much less be the same bloke. Turns out that, one on one and with the ice not so much broken as smashed to pieces, he’s a terrific chap. Then someone opened the door, he eased out of the car and the wall went straight back up again. But I didn’t care: I had my story, driven a proper WRC car, met and got to know one of the greatest drivers of any kind from any era, and made it back to be in Goodwood House in time to celebrate the Boy Wonder’s big birthday. Not a bad day out, all told.