Quote Originally Posted by focus206 View Post
What shenanigans would have Ogier prevented, exactly? Ogier doesn't design car parts, engineers do. Ogier can say "the car understeers too much", maybe he can loosely suggest modifications to differential, everything else is up to engineers. And this is if we give for granted that Ogier would have had the patience to pull Hyundai out of unreliability, which he didn't have with Citroen.

Thierry is the only driver in recent memory who won the title while driving clearly not the best car. Even Ogier's Fiesta in 2017 and 2018 wasn't the fastest, but was the most reliable.
I think in general its the question how much impact a driver has on the success of a team. Personally I hold the driver in high regard. Building and maintaining a car for a driver that will win if the car is up to par must have a huge impact on team morale. Additionally such drivers tend to get what they want from the team, if there are no preventing circumstances (MSport out of money, Citroen doing whatever they did). Success also breeds succes, better engineers want to work for you in such a team