Monte Carlo : A snowy start to 2013

The fifth decade of world class rallying kicked off today with a snowy shakedown ahead of the 2013 Rallye Monte-Carlo, round one of the 2013 World Rally Championship. The wintry conditions provided competitors with a foretaste of what they can expect when serious business begins on Wednesday.

Forecasters had predicted that snow would sweep across France during the night and they were right. When we left our hotel to head for the Service Park early this morning, there must have been five centimetres of the stuff covering the car park. Happily, we had taken the precaution of ordering winter tyres for our hire car, so we didn’t think there would be a problem crossing Valence to get to work… Wrong!
The city’s snowploughs had been through and cleared the snow along the main roads. In its place, though, they left a layer of water which immediately froze at the sub-zero temperatures, creating a skating rink and causing traffic chaos. Valence was almost entirely blocked and it took us more than an hour to complete our five-kilometre journey.
As we crawled slowly along the icy ring-road, we could see the WRC cars travelling in the opposite direction en route to the start of the 3.58km shakedown stage. After a quick call to a member of Citroën’s management, we learned that the clerk of the course had authorised the use of studded tyres for this morning’s test (decision announced at 7:25am today). The French firm’s plan was two runs per driver, a return to service, then back out for two more runs...
As we wondered whether the rally cars, too, would find themselves caught up in the traffic jam, the drivers clearly believed in the strength of numbers because a dozen of them passed us in a convoy, taking advantage of their four-wheel drive transmissions to use parts of the road that the local motorists clearly preferred to avoid.
Not all the top crews were on studded Michelin tyres for the first pair of runs, however. All the Citroën runners had chosen the tiny metal tips, for example, as did Skoda’s Latvala and Ford’s Hanninen, but Ogier, Ostberg, Novikov and Neuville went out on snow tyres. For the second visit later in the morning, the Citroëns remained on studs, Latvala switched to snow tyres, Ogier tried studs, and all the Ford drivers opted for Michelin snow tyres.
Meanwhile, in the service park, some teams were dubious about the benefits of running their cars in such tricky conditions. “The main thing was to complete the four mandatory passes without hitting anything,” said Volkswagen engineer François-Xavier Demaison. “We completed all our pre-event work before coming to Valence.”
Citroën’s technical staff took a slightly different stance, however: “It’s always interesting to put the cars through their paces before the start and today’s run gave our crews a chance to get into the atmosphere of the event. That can never be a bad thing.”
Shakedown:
1, Neuville (Ford/Michelin), 2m26.1s.
2, Loeb (Citroën/Michelin), +2.6s.
3, Novikov (Ford/Michelin), +2.7s.
4, Hirvonen (Citroën/Michelin), +3.3s.
5, Latvala (Volkswagen/Michelin), +4.3s.
6, Ogier (Volkswagen/Michelin), +4.4s.
7, Sordo (Citroën/Michelin), +5.7s.
8, Ostberg (Ford/Michelin), +6.8s.
Etc.
from  best-of-rallylive