Nobody can deny that Kris Meeke earned his splendid victory in Portugal. The scale of his domination was clear for all to see, and the way that he availed himself of the opportunities uniquely presented by his running order advantage was impressive.
There was one very curious aspect to all this, however. Kris did not contest the whole route!
When the organisers of the rally understood the seriousness of the fire in stage five, they gave instructions to stop the stage. This was carried out after Martin Prokop had left the start line and all the other cars, headed by Eric Camilli and Kris Meeke, were re-routed to the next stage.
Once the rally was back on track again came the urgent need to decide what “interruption times” had to be allocated for drivers who were re-routed.
A decision had to be made immediately, the consequence which might well decide who would ultimately win the rally. In the end Meeke, the overall leader, was awarded a time that was 5.2 seconds quicker than the next fastest driver.
The relevant factors were not only what time the drivers might have posted on this stage, but also if missing the stage would have given an undeserved advantage on the following stages. They could tackle the ensuing stages in the loop of stages with fresher tyres.
In this instance the times allocated by the Stewards seemed fair, even if it increased Meeke’s lead arbitrarily, and as the rally progressed the impact of the decision indicated that it had no material bearing on the result of the rally. Happily!
This is not a new problem. In 2002 there was a spectacularly similar situation in Corsica. Colin MacRae crashed on the penultimate stage when running tenth car on the road, and three cars later the organisers halted the stage, right ahead of Gilles Panizzi, who was running 13th car and who was the rally leader.
Panizzi drove the long final stage on fresh tyres. At that time standard instructions were to allocate the time by the slowest driver to date, which would immediately have lost Panizzi his hard-earned lead.
The Stewards defied FIA instructions and allocated Panizzi with the same time as the fastest driver to date, which was Gronholm. Nobody complained, Panizzi went on to win the rally, beating Gronholm by around 40 seconds, and Gronholm went on to be world champion for a second time.
- Martin Holmes