[WRC] Monza Rally 2020

[mknight]

Well I found the ratings of all Toyota drivers except Ogier kinda funny.

Rovanpera 8/10 for basically just finishing the rally as last WRC and being faster than Veiby/Greensmith? 5-6 max imo.

Katsuta 8/10 for crashing out on first stage after a double-error? Again around 6 max.

Similarly Veiby gets 4/10 for never being ahead of a Rally2 car trough 7 stages before making two mistakes?

And again there is the issue where he gives ratings to drivers that have the var fail on them after one stage (Suninen in this case, Lappi in Sardinia).

[BigWorm]

hahahaha

Evans 10/10
Neuville 3/10

https://dirtfish.com/rally/wrc/colin...river-ratings/

Hard to take it seriously, one driver he's being objective and the next he's rating by heart. This applies to most ratings this season.

[T16]

I've said it for ages.. Colin Clarke just doesn't know what he's talking about.

[focus206]

really?


Where was long-term team leader Thierry Neuville? Out of the rally after needlessly clipping a chicane and then drowning his engine as a result of the reduced speed he had to go at.

https://dirtfish.com/rally/wrc/what-...0-monza-rally/

The two Dirtfish articles you posted is why I still don't really trust them, as they seem to act as WRC hype boys and include the usual Colin Clark's biased articles with super praise of everything British and Ogier, in comparison to Neuville and Tanak.

[seb_sh]

In Loeb era you didn't see specialists mostly because you could only enter 2 cars that could score points, not 2 out of 3, this was also true for first few years with Ogier/VW if you recall.

I don't think there is a shortage of specialists, Østberg in Citroen 2018 was pretty much working as a specialist and it worked on fast gravel, Breen is essentially a specialist at this point too (based on his run at Citroen in 2017-18).

You're right, I forgot about that, indeed the 2 car rule contributed a lot to limiting specialists over time. On the other hand when that rule came in there were very few teams were rotating drivers. So I think it's a mix of that rule and "complete" drivers that were faster than event specialists even with road order advantage. Which specialist could beat Gronholm/Hirvonen/Latvala in their prime and they struggled against Loeb... so hard to find any realistic contenders at that point. And not to mention on tarmac, Citroen at one point had the 2 best tarmac drivers as their full time drivers.

In any case nowadays it seems there is a wider spread of talent and some drivers who benefit from road order can make the difference. Sordo for example has always missed the last few % of speed and consistency but if he gets good road order and a bit of luck it pushes the balance in his favour.

If we look at who does not have a contract next year you could probably make a nice 3rd car mix of 3-4 drivers that would benefit from road order advantage and fit certain rallies. Thinking of Sordo, Breen, Lappi, Mikkelsen, Paddon. Say you put Sordo on Monte, Croatia, Sardinia, Spain and Japan, then Breen in Sweden, Estonia, GB, then Lappi in Portugal and Finland, and Mikkelsen or Paddon in Kenya and Chile you have a good mix and are playing the road order game to the max. Obviously just pulled this out of you know where but it's interesting that it could be done.

[seb_sh]

Well I found the ratings of all Toyota drivers except Ogier kinda funny.

Rovanpera 8/10 for basically just finishing the rally as last WRC and being faster than Veiby/Greensmith? 5-6 max imo.

Katsuta 8/10 for crashing out on first stage after a double-error? Again around 6 max.

Similarly Veiby gets 4/10 for never being ahead of a Rally2 car trough 7 stages before making two mistakes?

And again there is the issue where he gives ratings to drivers that have the var fail on them after one stage (Suninen in this case, Lappi in Sardinia).

yeah, I think Colin is a great reported but a shitty analyst. He gave Evans a 10 essentially because he's a nice guy and he felt sorry for him and thrashed Thierry for making mistakes. Here's what he said about Thierry by i replace Thierry with Elfyn:

Elfyn had a job to do this week and he failed to do it. His mistake early on in the event put massive pressure on his team-mates to bring home the result that ultimately delivered the manufacturers title to Hyundai. There will be no one more disappointed than Elfyn I’m sure but there won’t be room for too many more mistakes like this one in the future. Evans will be a title challenger in 2021 again for sure, but the competition is very much hotting up.

3/10 ... just saying ...

Then he gave Sunninen a 4 because his engine failed after 1 stage...


As a side note about Evans i'm a bit bothered about the british bias of the commentators, often i've switched to no commentary (thank god for that option). If i'm honest they keep putting Evans in the same group as Ogier, Tanak and Neuville but I disagree. All his wins and even this title challenge have come under exceptional circumstances. If he had won he had deserved it, he got the points fair and square but i think he's more of a dark horse that is close enough to pick up the pieces when the others hit trouble. just my 2c

[cali]

Just finished reading it

What a joke of a ratings

The guy has been smoking some good shit lately.

Not just lately. I've been talking about this for years. He is an entertainer not an rallying-insider-specialist. Kinda of a joke really with his analyses

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[T16]

Not just lately. I've been talking about this for years. He is an entertainer not an rallying-insider-specialist. Kinda of a joke really with his analyses

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100% agree. I gave him 'another chance' and watched his Rally Finland testing report (I mean - does he realise hoy lucky he is to get flown over to watch a bloody test?!) and he just talked about a band he could hear all night from his balcony.
He's a complete fraud.

[cali]

Just a follow-up on this Colin Clark topic.

https://twitter.com/DirtFishRally/st...646463502?s=19

He actually believes giving some biased ratings is really justified. Not gonna read his crap again

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[mknight]

You know after end of 2017 season, C. Clark went public saying that Evans will fight for title in 2018 no matter what car he drives.

What followed was probably Evans worst season, completely outclassed by Ogier in same car with one single good performance in Catalunya. There was wide speculation here and elsewhere that he won't start 2019 season with MSport, but he did (probably due to lack of better alternatives at the time).

As people would remember in 2019 Evans did two very good rallies (Corsica and GB) and got a Toyota seat for this year.

Outtakes
- C. Clark is not objective when it comes to UK drivers (interestingly he was actually quite objective when talking about Meeke, but for some reason Evans, Greensmith and Breen are different (in about that order))
- Tiny margins can mean success or disappearance (what if MSport dropped Evans for 2019?)