Driving the World's Best Rally Car

As we arrive, the world's greatest rally driver is relieving himself against a tree. It's as though we've appeared for an audience with the Queen, then been walked through Buckingham Palace to a small shed in the garden and found Her Majesty at the sink, up to her elbows in dishes.

We have come to meet Sebastien Loeb in France on a gravel-covered rally stage next to the Paul Ricard Circuit. This road-racing track, once the site of the Grand Prix of France and now a high-tech test track owned by Formula 1 promoter Bernie Ecclestone, has its own airport and five-star hotel (known as the Bernie Inn). So it's no surprise that Citroën has been able to pitch a couple of hospitality tents in the middle of an empty field next to this short practice loop.

Loeb was a schoolboy gymnast who at age 35 has become a five-time driving champion in the World Rally Championship as well as a successful racer at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and there's a strong possibility that he might soon be an F1 driver.

More important, the 2009 Citroën C4 WRC is here, too. It's not polished down to the rivets for our benefit, instead bearing the scuffs, scratches, dents and dirt of a hard life on a diet of rally stages. The absence of ceremony is what makes it special. This is not some carefully choreographed arms-length introduction to the C4 WRC. It is us, the C4 and the stage where we are about to drive it.

What Makes a Champion?
We have caught the 2009 Citroën C4 WRC at the summit of 21st-century rally sport, as new rules to cut costs seem likely to one extent or another emasculate rally cars for years to come. Until today the Citroën Total World Rally Team has never let anyone outside the team near the driving seat of the C4 WRC and there is a lot of anxiety masquerading as advice hanging in the air as a result. We ask if Loeb would like to join us in the passenger seat while we drive, but are politely told that insurance issues preclude it. There is also, we suspect, the possibility that Loeb would rather be run over by the C4 than witness firsthand our attempt to drive it.

Still, there are many competition machines more conceptually scary than a modern WRC rally car. This particular one looks like a Citroën C4 because it is one, a production car at heart.

Its turbocharged 2.0-liter engine sits transversely in the engine bay and cocked at an angle of 25 degrees, and it produces 315 horsepower at 5,500 rpm just as called for in WRC regulations, though it's a milder state of tune than certain road cars we could name. But the headline grabber is the torque, some 420 pound-feet of torque at 2,750 rpm — a preposterous amount for such a small engine. This urge is directed through a sequential-shift six-speed manual transmission before being sent in four different directions via the media of mechanical differentials at the front and rear and an electronically controlled item in the middle.

The suspension is interesting. At the front you'll find a strut-type arrangement similar in basic architecture to that of a C4 road car. But at the back, the road car's torsion-beam axle has been replaced by struts to allow the longer wheel travel and ground clearance required by off-road rallying.

All in all, the C4 weighs in at the 1,230-kg (2,712 pounds) minimum limit mandated by the WRC regs, about the same weight as a regular C4 shopping car.

Welcome to the Office
Happily there's hardly anything difficult about the 2009 Citroën C4 WRC that you have to learn in order to drive it.

Yes, there are 12 separate controls on the steering wheel, covering everything from computer mapping for the engine and torque split for the center differential, plus various launch control strategies (and the lights and windshield wipers). But there's a steering wheel and all we have to do is look at the gear indicator and shift up when the light glows — there's not even a rev counter. Even the pedals are ordinary, although the clutch is displaced to the left as it plays no further role in the proceedings once the car is rolling.

Loeb leans in the window to tell us what to do. But he is not known for his communication skills and simply shows us the stage mode switch, which is meant to be activated only once the car is under way, and the way the shift paddle (there is just one) works. You pull it toward you to change up and push it away to change down. There is a shift lever sprouting from the floor, but it's only to be used if the shift paddle stops working.

We ask Loeb if there's anything else we need to know. He replies with a small shrug and returns to talking technical with his engineer, Didier Clement. Someone slams the door and we are alone.

The Noisy Part
The engine starts with a rude farting noise, yet it is tractable enough once you have negotiated the engagement of the sharp but hardly savage triple-plate carbon clutch. We engage Stage mode and the ride begins.

We thought that driving one of these beasts at speed on gravel would be an inherently difficult thing to do. It would need to be provoked into drifts and then controlled with a degree of precision at odds with the vague, loosely assembled surface beneath. After all, this car has no traction control, stability control or ABS, so it responds exclusively to commands issued by your feet and hands without the ability to interpret or moderate.

"The faster you go, the better it feels."

But while it accrues speed with dazzlingly little effort as you barrel down this narrow stone-strewn channel until the French countryside is passing your ears like something out of Star Wars, it doesn't seem difficult at all. In fact, the faster you go, the better it feels, like a slicks-and-wings road racing car. Driving the 2009 Citroën C4 WRC very fast indeed seems a natural, straightforward process.

The car reacts sharply to the throttle and will change its cornering attitude accordingly, but that's an entirely good thing in a rally car. If you drove this WRC like you might a road racing car, it would understeer its way around every corner, but if you brake and turn simultaneously (and sooner than seems sensible), the car fluidly assumes an oversteering attitude. This can then be exploited with the throttle until you reach the stage where the nose is pointing at the corner, the car is travelling around it and you're sitting there using next to no steering lock — opposite or otherwise — and wondering what all the fuss is about.

The C4 is also astoundingly comfortable. Its suspension is so soft you can see the nose rise and fall with every application of throttle or brake, yet so precise and well-damped that potholes feel like small divots, if you feel them at all.

Zen Master
When we returned to Citroën's hospitality tent, it is fair to say we were rather pleased with our performance. True, no one leaned in the C4's window with a contract on one hand and a Mont Blanc pen in the other, but we put that down to a certain Gallic insouciance.

We wanted to talk weapons-grade rallying technique with Loeb but he seemed not to want to play. When we sat down, he was as hard a subject to interview as we had been led to believe. Never rude, nor even monosyllabic, he nevertheless seemed disinclined to indulge us with anything more than straight, perfunctory answers to each question.

Still, our ride with the winner of 52 (and counting) WRC events awaited. Our experience in the car made us quite look forward to it, too. How different could it be from the experience we'd already had on the other side of the car?

Master Class
When we play the voice recorder back now, all we can hear are our giggles and Loeb's gearchanges as he runs the 2009 Citroën C4 WRC straight up through the gearbox to 6th. And holds it there, flat as we approach a right-hand bend over a crest that we took rather cautiously in 3rd but thought would probably be all right in 4th. Loeb never even looks like he's braking, let alone slowing down, and we suspect the only reason he has even lifted has been to ease the car into a drift. It is traditional British reserve alone that stops us from screaming.

Our memory is a bit confused for the next few seconds as the brain realizes that an entirely different level of concentration is on the menu. It finally reboots just as we plunge down into a forest. The track is narrower here and studded with trees, although Sebastien appears not to have noticed.

Loeb doesn't steer, accelerate and brake like the rest of us. It's as if his limbs are all loosely tied together by some complex belt arrangement, so that there is never a movement from one without a commensurate adjustment from another. When we had asked him to define his driving style, his "I don't know" seemed like a bored reaction to an overly familiar question. But in a few moments, we see that his actions are natural, fluid, economical and almost casual in a way you could not learn and must therefore be instinctive. When Sebastien Loeb is sideways between the trees at 100 mph, he's not thinking about catching slides, managing masses and balancing throttles — he's probably thinking about dinner.

Loeb's left-foot braking technique is most interesting. He uses it to slow the car as you would expect, but he also uses it to give the brake a sharp jab to neutralize understeer, or a long, light caress in quicker corners just to trim the car's attitude. Sometimes he appears to be on both pedals at the same time, but so wild is the ride and so keen are we not to redecorate the interior of the 2009 Citroën C4 WRC with the contents of our increasingly nauseous stomach that we can't stare at the pedals for long.

One More Time Around the Block
We arrive back at the finish of the stage and Loeb starts another lap, perhaps a shade quicker than the last. Above all, whatever you see Loeb do, he seems to have total faith that it will stick, come what may. That's impressive enough on a racetrack when you know what's under your wheels, but out here in the forest it's nothing less than astonishing.

We only know the ride is over when he reaches down and flicks the engine out of Stage mode. We look across to find the Sebastien Loeb of our tortured interview replaced by someone whose face is split by the biggest grin you've ever seen. "Was that OK?' he asks between chuckles.

"Unbelievable. How was it for you?" we stammer in return.

"Very good," he replies, "except in my ears all I hear is laughing." Our helmets are wired for sound, of course, a fact we'd forgotten and which Sebastien clearly finds hilarious.

So now we could ask the killer question. "How hard were you trying? Eighty percent?"

"Oh no," he says. "That was faster than a stage." Faster? "Yes, I have been round here many times. I know where it goes, so I can push harder than normal."

We laugh some more, shake hands and part as old friends. But as Loeb exits the 2009 Citroën C4 WRC and others approach, the shutters come down on his personality. We've seen the same phenomenon the only time we met the late F1 driving champion Ayrton Senna — a man positively chatty in the car, impenetrable out of it.

This, then, is the real Sebastien Loeb in his natural environment, doing what he was born to do. Here where there is no party line to tread, no awkward questions, no tape recorders or lights, he can be himself. For a moment, we catch a glimpse of a man who once outside the cockpit, you would never know existed.

Portions of this content have appeared in foreign print media and are reproduced with permission.