SAVE OUR JARI-MATTI!

This poor guy’s praying to keep his rallying dreams alive.

If you’re on this site and you’re a rally fan you should be praying too.

Thankfully crash.net have now reported that Malcolm Wilson has confirmed his faith in Jari-Matti in allowing him to compete in Argentina after earlier hinting that his future at Ford was in doubt.

Jari-Matti and Malcolm are all smiles, I doubt there are many smiles in the Ford service area at the moment

Good on you Malcolm – Jari-Matti needs his team and his fans at this difficult time.

But as per usual after something like this you get the armchair critics blasting the poor boy and now he apparently doesn’t deserve his drive as he’s not making the most of his opportunities.

Latvala’s a one off.

I can see where these ‘fans’ are coming from but in my eyes he’s the best we’ve seen in years, maybe he’s just trying too hard.

He’s not a Duval, he’s not arrogant and wasting his chances. He’s quick, exciting to watch and is a genuine guy who’s passionate about what he does.

He has the speed but his unharnessed potential means he can’t take advantage of it – that’s down to the team to help him through.

I can’t begin to imagine how he’s going to tackle Argentina but what he doesn’t need is people turning on him in this stage of his career. We can’t afford to lose him now!

So come on, show your support with Remote:Service!

What a difference a year makes

This time last year we were all basking in the glory of WRC’s ‘saviour’ Jari-Matti Latvala.

His win in Sweden injected a glimmer of excitement to the WRC. He was a champion in waiting but he’s only finished on the podium once this season and has only completed the other two events using the Super Rally system after driver errors forced early retirements.

And you all know what happened this weekend. The less said about that the better.

Now fans on official WRC website the are voting whether he should stay in the team – 50% say yes, 50% say no. Earlier reports on the site also indicated team boss Malcolm Wilson was reconsidering Jari-Matti’s place in the team.

Oh dear.

I hope to high heaven that Jari-Matti’s fans aren’t turning into Lewis Hamilton fans – supporting all the way when things are good, then dropping the driver as soon as things go wrong.

Come on, rally round, show the boy some support.

A big one, a really big one

This is horrible.

Most of you guys will have already seen this and I think you’ll agree it’s pretty shocking.

If you haven’t seen it this is Jari-Matti Latvala crashing out of Rally Portugal fairly spectacularly. If you watch carefully he didn’t even clip the bank to the left too hard but it sent him flying over the barrier and 150m down a ravine – some reports are saying he rolled 12 times but I lost count.

I really don’t know how both Jari-Matti and Miikka Anttila came out of this unhurt.

It was his 24th Birthday too, what a present this was.

Hopefully we won’t see another accident like this for a long time.

Weekly round-up 16th Feb to 22nd Feb

All the important news from last week in a slightly more condensed version.

• Petter Solberg could be stepping up to a Citroen C4 as early as Rally Portugal in April.

• According to Autosport two manufacturer team cars were tampered with on Rally Norway. Local drivers Henning Solberg and Mads Ostberg had their damper settings interferred with, Henning’s the night before Shakedown and Ostberg’s the night before the final leg of the rally – I’ve been to a Parc Ferme before and have been shooed away by a big, burly security guard. During the night there are at least two of these scary security staff on the gates, if this was sabotage then what were these guards doing at the time?

• Max Mosley headed off to Paris this week to chair a WRC marketing seminar to further the debate about the future of the WRC – yes, shock horror, he’s actually taking an interest in the WRC for once.

• The Ford boys jetted off on a six day test straight after a ‘disappointing’ Rally Norway. Both Jari-Matti and Mikko were testing in Sardinia in anticipation of Rally Cyprus, with two days testing on asphalt and four days on gravel Mikko said it was important the team get the right car set-up for driving on asphalt stages but with gravel tyres and suspension, a set-up never used before so it will be interesting to see how it all works out.

Current driver standings – courtesy of wrc.com

														Total
1.	S. LOEB	10	10											20
2.	M. HIRVONEN	6	8											14
3.	D. SORDO	8	4											12
4.	H. SOLBERG	5	5											10
5.	J-M LATVALA	0	6											6
6.	C. ATKINSON	4	-											4
7.	M. WILSON	2	2											4
8.	S. OGIER	3	0											3
9.	P. SOLBERG	-	3											3
10.	K. AL-QASSIMI	1	-											1
11.	U. AAVA	0	1

Rally Norway: Ford v Superhuman Seb

Last year I was lucky enough to interview Mikko Hirvonen at Rally Day, Castle Combe.

He was a great guy; really friendly, down to earth and very eager to chat to everyone in the media centre. He was also very optimistic about his prospects for 2009 and when I asked him if he thought he would be in a better position to fight Sebastien Loeb for the title he replied,

“For sure I believe so, it was about consistency this year (2008) but the speed has really come as well and I’m sure next year it’s not just being consistent, I think we’ve got the speed to win more rallies as well so we’ll definitely be making it even harder for Sebastien.”

Heading into Rally Norway Mikko and team-mate Jari-Matti Latvala were both clear favourites and I for one expected a battle between the two of them for the win. What with Sebastien’s poor showing in the snow events of the past two years, Mikko’s win in Rally Norway 2007 and Jari-Matti’s triumph in Sweden last year, I believed, perhaps naively, in Mikko’s belief that he could make the championship race harder for the five time world champ and this belief would be put into practice on this event.

It never happened. Mikko finished second and Jari-Matti third.

Rally Norway podium, a 'disappointed' Mikko takes the second position. Picture courtesy of www.motorsport.com

After the rally he was quoted as saying the event had been ‘crazy at times’, he was pushing both himself and his car to the absolute limit and admitted that he just couldn’t respond to Seb’s speed.

He was leading, that’s the thing that gets to me the most. Ok, it was the smallest of margins but he was beating Seb.

Once again team tactics were put into put into play in the Ford camp but taking a gamble and slowing down to secure a better road position on Day Two just didn’t pay off this time. It seems to me that the disadvantage of being first on the road is almost non-existent to Sebastien now – with his dominance over the past five years he has had so much more practice running first than his rivals can boast.

It is up to Mikko himself to prove he’s up to the standard set by Seb, not some clever tactics devised from the comfort of the service park.

Unlike many I don’t think of him as an ‘average’ driver driving an ‘average’ car. He has shown himself to have great skill but being pitted against the seemingly unstoppable superhuman force of Sebastien and his C4 he, and his car for that matter are unfairly given this label.

However, it has now got to the stage where Ford cannot take a win on an event they go into as the absolute favourites and even using tactics doesn’t help. As a fan of Mikko I find this hard to say but realistically the only chance he has of “making it even harder” for Sebastien to get the title is if Ford produce a car up to the standard of the C4, but by the time that happens the greatest driver/car combination the sport has ever seen will be long gone.