Is Ogier a Loeb beater?

11th May 2010

By Anthony Peacock

I’ve been crunching some numbers. In the wake of Sebastien Ogier’s brilliant Rally New Zealand performance – and the subsequent talk of him taking over our world – I thought I would compare his early career statistics with those of Sebastien Loeb. They make interesting reading.

Ogier was a year earlier into the sport’s highest order – arriving at 24, while Loeb was 25. Undoubtedly, Ogier’s arrival made more waves than his countryman, with him taking a dominant Junior World Rally Championship victory on the 2008 Rally Mexico in a Citroen C2, finishing eighth overall on the Leon-based event to boot.

Compare that with Loeb’s arrival in the WRC: a far more low-key affair: he retired a Citroen Saxo from the 1999 Catalunya Rally. Ogier, of course, famously went on to land the 2008 JWRC crown at his first attempt.

At the end of the year, Ogier was handed a Citroen C4 WRC for Rally GB. And this is the really impressive bit: he led the event through the opening morning. The first stage in Wales was cancelled due to the icy conditions, but his time on the first run through Sweet Lamb was unbeaten and he led a WRC event for the first time.

He remained out front until stage six, when Jari-Matti Latvala took over. In the end, Ogier was classified 26th after rolling later in the rally. It mattered not, notice had been served. And a deal was done for 2009, when he would form part of the Citroen Junior Team.

Ogier’s first World Rally Car drive was his eighth WRC start. Loeb was in the hot seat far earlier than that: his fourth start was in a Toyota Corolla WRC, with backing from the FFSA. Loeb made the most of a two-rally deal, finishing ninth and 10th in Corsica and Sanremo in 2000.

So, first time out, it’s honours just about even: Ogier leads but crashes, Loeb grabs a top-10.

For a first ‘full’ season in the sport, nobody is ever really going to challenge Loeb. Running in the inaugural FIA Super 1600 Drivers’s Cup (the forerunner to the JWRC), Loeb won five from five. And, given a one-off Citroen Xsara WRC drive on Sanremo, hustled Gilles Panizzi all the way to the finish, only just missing out on a rainy win in Italy.

So, Loeb’s up now. His first podium came on WRC start number 13, Ogier’s was two later when he ended a miserable start to 2009 with a second on the Acropolis Rally. It’s only really from then on that Ogier’s career has returned to the rocket-like propulsion it promised in Mexico 2008.

But even then, it doesn’t truly compare with Loeb. Last week’s Rally New Zealand was Ogier 25th WRC start. It’s only in the number of top-10 finishes that Ogier compares more favourably with Loeb (13 compared with Loeb’s 10). By the time he’d reached the quarter-century of starts, Loeb had won twice and collected four podiums. Ogier has yet to win and has finished in the top three, three times.

So, there we have it: conclusive proof that Ogier is definitely good… but his start wasn’t quite the same as Loeb’s. And, if Ogier wants to put one over Loeb in the career-long stats, he’s going to have to win pretty much everything between now and 2015 before he can claim to be the first man to 58 wins.

Watch this space…