RE: Rally GB: Loeb Ends WRC Era With Victory

[anonymous-user]

Max_Torque said:

Mastodon2 said:

IIRC halfway through the 3rd day, Matt was something like 7 minutes down on Loeb. That's quite a gulf, and while I agree finishing and not binning it or running up huge bills is important, but I think being Malcolm Wilson's son probably gives him some leverage. Even if he consistently scores a ride, I don't think he will ever be a competitor really. He is young, but I just don't see that flair or skill in his driving, whereas his Finnish counterpart Latvala is young and very firey, takes risks and does bin it, but has really improved and become a lot more consistent.

Your right there, highlighting the difficult route to gaining wrc supremacy:

1) go fast, drive on the edge, have a lot of off's, but try to weather the bad publicity/annoyed team boss/sponsor(having worked at Prodrive during the "solbery years", we used to have bets how many straight pannels the car would have when it returned from events!(usually the winning bet was in low single figures lol), then learn how to tone it down just enough to gain some consistancy, but still maintain the ability to "turn it on" when required (the solberg/ latvala approach!)

2) start slow, build up experience, be consistent, probably not get too much attention, but get the job done, and hope that you can keep building the raw speed

or somehow do with the robot Loeb does, which is go very fast and also be massively consistent!!

Latvala has actually been pretty impressive this season, outpointing his more favoured team mate, and putting in some pretty fast times!

Without a doubt, having "wilson" as your surname is an advantage, but i think matts actually done quite well to live up to the reputation!

Matt has been around long enough to be past stage 2 now, he isnt showing any signs of being able to step up the pace IMHO.

Back in the days when Colin was learning, he was balistic even in a little Vauxhall Nova, the guy was obviously tallented, when he jumped into the turbo cars like the sierra he did crash a lot, but he was setting fastest stage times against world champions, the raw tallent was there.

Richard Burns was more of the slow burn type of tallent, but even he was winning the events he did at a decent international level like in the Asia Pacific, and he was also setting fastest times on ocasion when doing early WRC rounds, he wasn't as instantly quick as Colin, but he showed the tallent required and worked at it, on ocasion he was stunning, such as when driving in fog, even Colin couldn't match him then. You could see Richard improving all the time, he would have been multiple champion had his sad illness not have occured.

They say you can always calm down a quick driver, you can never speed up a slow driver when you get to this kind of level of tallent requirement, and i tend to agree with that. Loeb has been a real oddball as he was pretty quick off the mark without the big shunts, but you have to remember the guy was an olympic standard gymnast, so has pretty remarkable balance and dexterity which will help in this kind of environment.

I would love to see another Brit at the top in rallying, but as much as Matt is a good guy, i cant see him making that next step up, if he does drive next year he needs to just start taking bigger risks, the time for plodding is well past now.