Quote Originally Posted by sonnybobiche View Post
Personally, I've never rated Meeke at all and I rate Mikkelsen about average, but let's be fair. The reason Meeke was getting super generous offers from Toyota and Mikkelsen got none is that in 2015/2016 Toyota was desperate to sign a winning driver. They had been courting everyone from Latvala to Loeb, even Petter Solberg. Finally after VW blew up they signed Latvala, with whom they had already been in talks for over a year. When Mikkelsen came looking for work, they didn't have a seat for him, hence no attention. Heck, they didn't even have a seat for Lappi at that point. So I don't think that reflects any real opinions that Tommi may have had of Meeke's vs Mikkelsen's ability.
I get your point there, but imo Makinen and Matton could easily have found space for Andreas at the start of the year if they *really* wanted to. My take is that they didn't feel he was good enough to warrant the extra cost/ sidelining much weaker drivers in Hanninen and Lefebrve.

Both teams should have signed him there and then and basically everyone on this forum thought so as well, but it needed a total Citroen crisis for one of the team managers to reconsider (and even then it's only been a deal for a few events). Doesn't give off the vibe that the two managers rate the guy anywhere near as highly as they probably should.

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