Ford Fiesta RS WRC driven

In fact, it’s not just road legal. If you drop M-Sport a line, they’ll happily make you a WRC-spec Fiesta just as soon as your cheque for £450,000 has cleared. Bespoke competition vehicle it may be, but technically you can buy this and run it every day should you be wealthy and mad enough.Cruising nervously down the high street in the Fiesta, it’s tricky to remember the basic principle that spawned rallying. M-Sport admits the WRC Fiesta is tenuously linked to the road car by an engine block and a badge, but this is a sport that began with road cars being raced along public roads. It’s just morphed into something rather more specialised.

Finding out just how far removed from that basic principle the world’s top-end rally cars have come is one of the most interesting aspects of this trip for me, and it takes all of a few hundred yards to ascertain that it is about as far as it is possible to get.Hearing the two mechanical diffs that sit on the front and rear axles as part of the permanent four-wheel drive system clunking and grinding away as I manoeuvre into a space in Sainsbury’s car park (anything for a photo shoot), engine note spiking erratically with every toe twitch, is a surreal, almost trippy moment – a dream after some hardcore cheese. It’s topped by an old chap who parks his Civic next to the Fiesta WRC and gives it not even the barest glance as he squeezes past. Or maybe the best bit is when a local woman demands an itinerary of our day so she can ring her family, most of whom work for M-Sport, and tell them to come and watch. No pressure, then.

In reality, it is the poor visibility and the neurotic driver controls that make the Fiesta next to unusable on the roads around Cockermouth. This Fiesta couldn’t be more out of its natural habitat. It’s a penguin out of water – something you know to be epically brilliant in its favoured environment, but comically ill-suited anywhere else.

B-road blast

So, finally, we head to some back roads, and everything makes sense. I won’t bore you with tales of how I suddenly know exactly how Stig Blomqvist felt as he feathered the Quattro down the Col de Turini in 1984. I don’t. I am on a Cumbrian back road and have, by this point, been driven almost hysterical by the blood-freezing paranoia that has had my pulse beating fast somewhere up behind my eyeballs.

But then the road clears and there are a brief few moments when I actually experience something close to what this car is capable of. Painfully sensitive at 30mph, the car’s controls become almost pre-cognitive at more reasonable rally car speeds. The wheezing and grinding accompaniment morphs into a towering, angry, operatic note. The jerky, sequential shifts suddenly aren’t felt because they’re so rapid, and the steering appears to respond directly to electronic signals from your brain rather than hand movements. Everything just sings. And the car starts to work with you rather than against you.

With a clear view down the road and Miguel the mechanic in the support vehicle now far behind, the ‘stage’ button is an almost unbearable temptation. I know that this will unleash the full engine performance. And now, realising just how shatteringly brilliant this car is, even in neutered ‘road’ mode, I’m even more desperate to know what happens in maximum attack mode. But I don’t hit it. The mechanicals of a rally car are designed to be durable, and while crashing a rally car when you’re the driver on a rally is just something that happens, crashing a rally car when you’re a hack on a jolly is distinctly less cool. And much harder to explain.

What the WRC needs

So I still don’t truly know what a rally car feels like on full song. But, short of life support, I suspect this is as connected as a person can feel to a machine. And I do know that I now have even more respect for this sport. Even those people who dedicate themselves to it admit that world rallying is struggling. Although the entrance of Mini and Volkswagen promises a new injection of cash and competition, motorsport at this level can only survive with good coverage and a strong global fan base. Neither of which is present.

I asked Walter Röhrl in 2009 what he thought could be done to improve the WRC, and he claimed that going to countries such as South Africa and China, where manufacturers can really see a return in road car sales, was vital. Malcolm Wilson echoed this. More crucially, he stated that the WRC needed a Bernie Ecclestone – not something I expected to hear, but it does make sense that rallying needs an overlord to encourage and make the most of sponsorship and media coverage.