If Kris Meeke – the first British rally winner since Colin McRae – didn’t have his future so firmly mapped out in front of him, he could make a decent living as a clairvoyant. The 35-year-old has had his fair share of disappointment over the years but he’s always held an unshakeable belief in his own destiny.
“The thing is with this game,” he pointed out a few years back, when he was just a test driver, “is that you can be absolutely nowhere and suddenly get one phone call that changes your life.”
It wasn’t just any team that called either: it was Citroen. Effectively, Meeke was signed as Sebastien Loeb’s replacement, but it took two years for all that potential to finally come good on the top step of the podium. What we saw in Argentina was the end of a very long and often painful journey, with as many – if not more – moments of soul searching as triumph.
Meeke is the first to admit that on more than one occasion he so nearly blew it. He earned the Citroen drive following two auditions in 2013, when he was handed the keys to a DS3 for Finland and Australia.
In Finland, the fastest and most complex event of the year, he was told to show his speed. And he delivered. On his DS3 WRC debut he set top-three times and was set for a fifth-place finish until he rolled on the penultimate stage.
Never mind. For Australia, Meeke was asked to show consistency. Whatever happened, Citroen wanted him to get to the finish.
On the qualifying stage, he beat Sebastien Ogier to go fastest. Then, on the second day, he crashed out of fourth place.
The speed was beyond question. But Citroen’s decision to hire him was far from a foregone conclusion. Meeke faced an anxious wait at the end of 2013 to find out if he had done enough to keep those keys permanently. There was another wait, albeit slightly less fraught, at the end of 2014 to confirm that he would be retained this year. But what if the decision had gone the other way, and Citroen had said no? Chances are that he would have picked himself up, dusted himself down, and tried again. But there would have been no guarantee of a WRC victory at the end of it.
For many years, Meeke was Colin McRae’s protégé, even living in McRae’s castle in Lanark. It was easy to see how the two got on: both in terms of personality and driving style, which was win or bust.
“Yes, you can be completely safe all the time, but if you want to win rallies and championships you have to put it out there,” said Meeke. “And I think that was what Citroen wanted: someone who could come in and do that.”
The DS3 is clearly still competitive, four years after its debut. But it’s only Meeke who has really been able to push its limits in the same way as Loeb and Ogier.
The Northern Irishman has his own theory. “I’ve spoken about that with Loeb, and I think it’s because we both come from a front-wheel drive background,” he says. “While I wouldn’t say our driving styles are similar, there are some things in common. That’s because we both drive in the way we learned from smaller front-wheel drive cars.”
Meeke’s career began in 2000 when he entered a competition organised by Peugeot and Motoring News to find a rally driver. He won it, and you can guess the rest: a background remarkably similar to that of Loeb.
A period in the Junior World Rally Championship followed but his breakthrough year was 2009, when he was signed by Peugeot UK and won the Intercontinental Rally Challenge on his first attempt.
That should have led to a campaign with Mini on the WRC in 2011 and 2012, before funding for the programme ran dry.
Here’s the really astonishing thing about his time with Mini. “During my first six events I was closer to the front than any other driver who has entered the championship in the last 10 years,” points out Meeke. “We averaged 0.6 seconds per kilometre off the fastest time on every stage we did. The only other person to do that in his first six events was Sebastien Loeb.”
And that’s why Citroen chose him. It’s also why he won in Argentina.
Photo by: McKlein