2022 WRC News & Rumours

[mknight]

No, the exact opposite. And Breen's seasson just proves them right. He was supposed to be "the best of the rest" but they haven't really done better this year than with just paying drivers. But with Ogier they got three titles in two years.

Breen has underperformed a lot compared with last year. Last year he was clearly 2nd fast with some hopes for a win on 3 rounds, so for example better than Lappi in his Finland outing (sure much less time in car, but Lappi drove it for two years before). So his level this year should have been around that, given the car is up for it, which it was on Loeb's outings.

At the same time Breen was "risky choice" that was seemingly on the way up. Risky because there was quite a lot of rallies where he had little experience and was never in a position of team number 1 or even 2 before.

On rallies with little experience he did good this year, but probably not much better than expected. It's on rallies with experience that everything seems wrong...

But it is still very far off from paydrivers!
Greensmith/Fourmaux still don't have a single podium in their career. Breen has two just this year, double the points of Greensmith and 7 times as many as Fourmaux.


I think we agree MSport needs at minimum podiums/around podiums to actually attract paydrivers and show the car is competitive. Else they go to others when possible (Loubet and Veiby at Hyundai), or to Rally2 (Gryazin).
"Just paydrivers" are unable to prove that. What kept them in the game somehow in 2019 was Evans that could sometimes be fast (Corsica, GB (bare the issues)), but at that point he wasn't really a paydriver with no results.


For this year MSport had a relatively risky strategy, hoping that Breen will at least stay the same or improve (and charge for championship) and that Fourmaux and Greensmith improve. In a late move they secured themselves with Loeb (still risky given his performance at Hyundai, but free PR anyway).
Loeb proved really good move cause none of the other things worked. Breen is worse than last year, Fourmaux is going backwards (compare with Croatia or Portugal last year), Greensmith is the same (bad).

I agree with what was mentioned that new (money saving) strategy could be to drop Breen on some rounds, basically dialing back to his Hyundai starts, or to use someone else in that role.