Autocar drives Citroën’s DS3 WRC car - picture special

Five minutes later – just long enough for some of it to sink in and for my throat to become all dry and croaky again – we got the call and we were off. Allez, allez, let’s go.

Even the seat in the DS3 WRC is a work of art. Its sides are almost impossibly high, your bum is clamped quite perfectly in position by its dramatic sculpting and you sit really, really low in the car. When they release the air jacks and the car hits the ground, I almost can’t see over the steering wheel.

My co-pilot has already started the engine – a turbocharged 1.6-litre four that chugs away to itself and goes wap, wap when I prod the throttle. The response, even without the boost mode engaged, is massive and instant, the torque flow obviously immense.

But arguably more important than the engine itself is all the other stuff in a DS3 WRC: the diffs front, rear and middle, the superfast six-speed sequential gearbox (courtesy of Sadev) and the suspension, specifically the dampers, which are about as trick as they get and are the reason why the DS3 WRC is able to glide so beautifully across such harsh and heavy ground. And that’s the aspect of this car that I am most keen to experience first hand.

So I dip the clutch (heavy but not ludicrously so), pull back on the stubby, column-mounted gearlever, feel the tell-tale thunk as the gear engages and gradually increase the revs while the knee muscles in my left leg start to spasm slightly as I let out the clutch pedal.

And then we’re away, rumbling towards the stage, stones chattering in the wheel arches as the DS3’s heavy-duty rough-stage tyres pick up and spit out anything they can get their teeth into.

It’s incredibly noisy in here, not to mention hot, but the ride quality is spookily smooth and the steering is incredibly light and direct. The lack of physical effort required to drive this car, albeit gently for the time being, is not what I’d expected at all. Everything is easy, light, precise and direct, from the throttle pedal to the gearchange to the brakes.

Driving this car slowly is a piece of cake, I realise, whereas for some reason I’d expected the exact opposite.

Driving it fast, however, is something else. When I’d sat next to Meeke earlier, what had struck me was the peculiar absence of frenzied movement on his part. He hardly seemed to turn the steering wheel at all, despite the fact that we were travelling sideways pretty much the whole time, often on the other side of three figures. His economy of effort was mesmerising.

But as I trundle on to the stage and my co-driver suggests that I should “go, go, go, allez, allez”, I slowly begin to realise that driving the DS3 WRC at anything approaching a decent lick is actually all about precision. It feels fast in a straight line, yes, but not ridiculously so.

A Porsche 911 Turbo would not have much trouble keeping up with it on pure acceleration. But getting the most out of a WRC car has almost nothing to do with what happens on the straight bits. 

Because what matters most, of course, is what happens in the corners, and what’s most crucial of all is getting the car heading on the correct trajectory before each corner so that you can then aim it towards, through and out of that corner without losing momentum. And to do that, you need to set the car up sometimes tens of metres before each corner, often with the car heading in the absolute opposite direction.

And ultimately that’s what rally driving is all about, and the really spooky thing about the DS3 WRC is that it very nearly does all of it for you. Even with a modicum of commitment it floats, it turns and it grips, almost as if it is guided by some higher being.

Get it completely wrong and it understeers, but get it vaguely right and its nose will somehow pin itself to the centre of just about any corner apex. Once there, you give it a bootful of throttle, the diffs do their thing, the tail comes around – but not to the point where you need to apply anything more than a hair of opposite lock – and you fire out of the corner in a near-perfect, electronically enhanced four-wheel drift.

It feels quite beautiful, to be honest, until my co-driver reaches down and presses the button marked ‘boost’, at which point it feels as if another 300bhp has been unleashed and the images in the windscreen go into fast forward. Even so, the DS3 still feels very much as if it’s on your side.