Sébastien Ogier Gets Fined Yet Again in WRC Rally Catalunya
Sébastien Ogier was still able to take his damaged car to victory in Croatia. Ogier was fined $5,800 (€5,000) for leaving the scene and another $2,320 (€2,000) for running a red light shortly afterwards. He was also given a one rally suspended ban to be enforced should he commit a similar offense over the next six months. However due to mitigating circumstances, the incident in Rally Catalunya won’t be applicable to the suspended ban and Sébastien Ogier will still be able to participate next month in Rally Monza, the World Rally Championship season finale. Ogier currently leads the championship by 17 points over Elfyn Evans.
When’s the best time to start your career as a rally co-driver? As with most things, I’d assume the younger the better — and that’s just what this dad has done with his daughter.
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This video comes from Ridonkulous Rally Sports, a YouTube channel that shares videos of a family-run team’s efforts to conquer the local rally world. There are tons of great in-car shots from domestic American rallies for those of you that love events like the Southern Ohio Forest Rally or the Sno*Drift Rally that takes place in the winter.
But there are also plenty of videos of the family having fun, and that’s just what we have with this co-driver clip:
The short video is worth a watch. In it, a young girl has a book on her lap and takes it upon herself to direct the driver where he needs to go. She calls out a series of directions and numbers from her Things That Go book, occasionally agreeing with the driver when he lets her know they have to take a hairpin.
It ends with a wonderful sentiment: “When the kid wants to help, you let her help. When she asks to ride in the car when you’re pulling it in the shop for the night, you give her a ride, even if it’s only a 20 sec ride. When she climbs in and turns that red light on and then pulls out her pace notes all on her own, you always 100% take that freakin ride! Never get so busy that you miss the little things. The most important things.”
Kudos to you, dad. It sounds like you’re raising a future rally champion! And for everyone else at home: get your kids involved with your cars. Many of my favorite childhood memories revolve around being included in my family’s automotive pursuits. Bring the little ones in and have some fun.
About a month ago, the Mercedes-EQ Formula E team announced it’d signed an option with the series to begin development of its Gen 3 car. “Development,” in this sense, is pretty much tantamount to attending meetings alongside all the other constructors — but don’t mistake it as a confirmation of ongoing participation. The Gen 3 regulations are expected to kick in after the next season, beginning with the 2022-23 championship, and last until the end of the 2025-26 campaign.
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On Tuesday, team boss Ian James related in a virtual roundtable discussion, of which Jalopnik was a part, that Mercedes still isn’t quite ready to officially commit to the Gen 3 cycle. However, James also said that formalization will come “in due course.”
We need to take decision obviously at some point because of the development work that’s going on, and at the moment we’ve registered as an interested manufacturer. Therefore we’re able to take part in the technical working groups and so on and so forth.
So I don’t think it’s going to drag on for too much longer, but this just like the natural part of the process — just making sure that, you know, we understand the direction the things are going in and that it’s right. Mercedes has a lot of things going on internally — as there is across the whole automotive industry at the moment — and so there’s sort of external factors to us as a team, which needs to be taken into consideration, and that will all be done in due course.
What’s interesting about Mercedes dragging its feet with respect to a full endorsement is that many of its major automaker-aligned rivals have not. At the end of March a group of constructors, including Porsche, Nissan, Mahindra and DS, made their continued involvement known. There was said to be a deadline at this time for teams to make that call, as The Race reported, but Mercedes evidently decided to take its sweet time and not worry too much if anyone noticed.
If the tentative Gen 3 specifications bear out as planned, Formula E cars should receive quite the power bump — rising from the current qualifying spec of 250 kW (335 horsepower) to 350 kW (469 HP), and 300 kW for races. Energy recovery, or regen, will be harvested from both axles. The addition of mid-race “flash-charging” will necessitate pit stops for refueling, adding a degree of strategy and unpredictability while potentially extending race length, too. Perhaps Formula E will even be able to entertain more full-scale circuits as it’s attempted to this year, considering the cars will be more powerful and possibly be able to run for longer.
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But Formula E is in no position to twist Mercedes’ arm. It’s already losing Audi and BMW after this season, as the Silver Arrows’ top two domestic rivals have set their sights on sports car racing, specifically with LMDh prototype programs. LMDh is not a pure-electric series — though it does involve a spec hybrid component — so there is some alternative energy marketability there.
So the ball is really in Mercedes’ court at this point. That said, given the language James and the team’s technical advisor/development driver, Gary Paffett, were using on the call, it doesn’t seem like the company is feigning interest in Formula E just to dip out without a moment’s notice. I asked Paffett — who wears multiple hats within the team — to sum up his feelings on what Gen 3 will bring to the series. It seems he’ll relish the opportunity to get behind the wheel:
The circuits we race at, they’re very tight. Already with the car we have now, the Gen 2 car, the 250 kW in qualifying — you’re arriving at some corners thinking, you know, you could be in an F1 car in Mexico doing 320 [km/h]. They are damn quick. So the prospect of the speed we’re going to have in Gen 3 cars is going to be incredible. It’s going to be an incredible car to drive. And … the harvesting from both axles adds a completely new dimension.
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James and Mercedes in general have been nonspecific in explaining why the team hasn’t yet planted its flag for Formula E’s next era, but it’s fair to assume money probably has something to do with it.
It’s understandable that Mercedes would want to be absolutely sure it’s making the proper investment. Part of Gen 3’s addendums states that any team that exits the series midway through a regulatory cycle, as Audi and BMW are about to, must pay Formula E the lump sum of all the regulatory fees it would have incurred on a yearly basis if it’d just kept competing until the end of the cycle.
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Those fees amount to $415,000 per year — quite a lot to pony up at once just to not race, though only a small portion of the roughly $12 million Jaguar is said to have spent in 2019. (A prospective cost cap figures to bring that down by as much as two thirds.) Formula E is hoping constructors see that bill and decide they might as well stick around. And even if they don’t, the organizers can still make some scratch as teams walk out the door.
Sorry Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, your car is pretty much only going to get less competitive as the 2021 season drags on, because Scuderia Ferrari says it’s moving “90 to 95 percent” of its focus to developing its 2022 car and the new regulations. It will not risk compromising next year’s car to try and beat McLaren to third in the championship this year.
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2020 was not a good year for Ferrari, as it couldn’t do any better than sixth in the constructors’ championship. After it was forced to rein in its illegal 2019 engine, the car was significantly slower. Imagine that. For 2021, however, the Scuderia has managed to find a way to make its engine more powerful, presumably in a legal fashion this time. The SF21 isn’t as hopeless as 2020’s SF1000 had been.
After the first four races of the season, Ferrari trails behind McLaren by just 5 points, and Charles Leclerc is currently in fifth position in the world drivers’ championship. Clearly the team has found the speed needed to compete at the front of the mid pack. But it wouldn’t take much improvement for Alpine or Alpha Tauri to catch them up.
Laurent Mekies, Ferrari F1 sporting director, has said he has committed to fully focusing on next year’s car. “We are pretty much already in full switch, it’s already the case for us. If you want to put a number to it, if you call it 90 percent, 95 percent, whatever you want to call it, but it’s pretty much where we are.”
“This is very clear to us, we are focused on 2022,” Mekies added. “The fact that the field is tight that you may need a few hundredths or a few tenths to switch from sixth to third will not change our strategy, the focus is on next year. We have switched the large majority of our resources to it already. It doesn’t mean that some details will not change on the car from now onwards, as we all do with what we learn at the racetrack. But the focus is on next year, even if the field is tight. For us it is a clear decision.”
Interestingly, McLaren have taken the opposite tack.
Team boss Andreas Seidl commenting at the Spanish Grand Prix, “If you look since the first test this year onwards we simply tried to continuously bring updates to the car, to make continuously steps forward with the performance We’ve also brought upgrades for example to Portimao, we’ve brought updates for the car also here in free practice. And our plan is to still bring further updates also in the coming races.”
He later added, “It’s obviously a very tight battle, especially with Ferrari, and it’s simply important to make sure we keep bringing upgrades to the car in the next races in order to keep this battle of P3 alive.”
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Mekies seems to be totally fine with Ferrari sinking down to 6th in the championship again this year. It is only the third team (after Haas and Williams) to announce they had no more intention of developing the 2021 chassis. There’s no telling what other teams will do between now and then, but if I were Alpine, I’d be working on some mid-season updates right about now. Good luck with your 2022 car, Ferrari, it sounds like you’re going to need it.
