Pump down the volume: Citroen prepares to electrify rallying

The normally sedate seafront of Llandudno shook to the roar of Wales Rally GB, but as Sean O’Grady reveals, could the sound of silence provide the backdrop to future races?

The Citroen C3 Aircross, a paragon of consumer value and green values under normal circumstances, does about four miles per gallon when in full rally prep form

I remember the old Les Dawson joke all too well. “I went to Rhyl once. It was shut”.

As with much of his humour, there was some affection lying beneath the scorn, and have to say I like north Wales. I like it so much that I was perfectly happy to be perched on a little hill above the very nicely refurbished Llandudno seafront watching the “road stage” of the Rally Wales GB, the British round of the World Rally Championship (WRC). This involves the drivers spanking their racing Toyota Aygos, Ford Focuses, Skoda Fabias and Citroens C3s round the town, all sideways drifting, squealing tyres and bubbling burbling engines. I don’t know if there is a Welsh word for that peculiarly miserable species of drizzle which the Scots call “dreich”, but we spectators were subjected to it a horrible dose of it. I hardly noticed, so much fun was I having. No, really.

(Citroen)

The forest stages are even more exciting, because there is an even greater danger of someone’s car attacking a tree. And the bit where you get to see the teams of mechanics descending on the cars for a service like just so many Amazonian killer ants was also a joy. I had to wonder why it takes my garage all morning to change the oil and filters on my Skoda, but I could watch the Citroen team virtually rebuild a rally C3 Aircross in half an hour. But all the time I was much more perplexed by the stray fact I’d picked up, in a trip organised for me by Citroen (proper disclosure there) that the Citroen C3 Aircross, a paragon of consumer value and green values under normal circumstances, does about four miles per gallon when in full rally prep form.

So it comes as a sort of shock even to the most casual motorsport fans such as your correspondent – that rallying is going green. In future, Citroen says, it would like to see some rally stages conducted in electrified, zero-carbon silence, the raucous metallic mechanical symphony replaced by cars running in near silence. One option is for shorter stages to be run using only electric power, others run with petrol/electric hybrids and others with the traditional fossil-fuel powered designs.

(Citroen)

Citroen racing team director Pierre Budar is clear that it is something Citroen would like to see, but he has his concerns: “Components will have to be the same for everybody, at least for the beginning. Developing our own system would be very costly.”

He adds that, with the extra weight of the batteries, the company will need to save weight elsewhere in its rally C3 Aircross cars, but in any case “we have to develop a car now”, and “we will decide when Citroen knows what the regulations are”. Given the lead time and the eventual retirement of this generation of the Citroen C3 model, decisions need to be made soon.

Budar sees a petrol-electric hybrid as a “good proposition” because it would at least retain some of that evocative growl from an internal combustion engine.

(Citroen)

The broader aim is for the electrification of rallying to begin with the 2022 WRC, with additional costs for all the teams, whether shared or not. Earlier this year Citroen boss Linda Jackson said the company would have to reconsider staying in WRC if the current rules didn’t move with the times: “Because everything is changing and I don’t see how I can continue to support something that is without any reflection of what’s going on in society.”

It would certainly be a loss to have Citroen abandon WRC, for them as well as the fans. Their driver Sebastien Ogier – who took bronze in Wales – is in second position in the overall drivers’ standings, with two more rallies, this weekend’s Rally Catalunya in Spain and next month’s Rally Australia to run. They should be exhilarating, even without the drizzle.