WRC swap shop…

18th October 2011

By Anthony Peacock

On British television, those of us of a certain age will remember a show on Saturday mornings that was called ‘swap shop’, hosted by Noel Edmonds in a series of truly terrible jumpers.

The premise of the show was quite simple: it was simply a forum for people to exchange stuff they didn’t want, normally – considering the items in question – for entirely understandable reasons.

Whether or not the parties who swapped possessions were entirely pleased with their transactions was never subsequently documented, but it’s hard to imagine that they were.

Which leads us neatly onto one of the most intriguing rumours to emerge from the service area in recent weeks: the prospect of Ford and Citroen engineering a straight swap at the end of this year, Mikko Hirvonen for Sebastien Ogier.

The sketch, according to the story, goes like this. Ogier isn't happy being at Citroen, faced with the prospect of being number two to Sebastien Loeb for the next two years. Ford feels that their all-Finnish line-up is in something of a comfort zone, and it’s of course no secret that they've tried to get Ogier in the past. Volkswagen would naturally be another appealing destination for Ogier, but he doesn’t want to sit out next year testing, with the odd drive in a Super 2000 Skoda. So Ford it is – for the next year or two at least – while the hole at Citroen is plugged by Hirvonen, who is exactly what the French squad might need after a tumultuous year: Finnish, implacable, dependable and not in any way political.

A precedent for this actually exists in Formula One: following a year of fireworks between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, McLaren decided to replace the departing Alonso with a friendly Finn, Heikki Kovalainen. Harmony promptly ensued.

The idea seems a bit far-fetched but on this occasion people who are normally right about their facts are talking about it, which either means that they’ve all been taken in or that it might actually happen… 

We'll find out in the fullness of time obviously, but it’s a fascinating possibility. If the switch did take place, we’d finally know what the real relative pace of the Fiesta and the DS3 was, given that one person would have driven both.

And maybe we’d get a complete surprise – such as Hirvonen giving Loeb the fright of his life in the same car. That’s hard to see though, as Citroen’s bosses seem to have set out their stall quite clearly.

However, with Hirvonen and Ogier having been linked to their respective manufacturers for a number of years now (especially Hirvonen) a shake-up would certainly create a few talking points if nothing else.

 The simple truth of the matter is that nothing is agreed yet, with Ogier and Citroen in particular insisting to anyone who asks that they will still be together in 2012. But if nothing changes, will that be an opportunity missed – for both sides?