Team bosses reflect: Saturday in Mexico

Back in the service park in Leon, here’s what Jost Capito (Volkswagen Motorsport), Yves Matton (Citroen Total Abu Dhabi) and Malcolm Wilson (Qatar M-Sport) had to say about Saturday’s competition:

Q. Jost, Sebastien Ogier is still in the lead at the end of what is now the penultimate day here at Rally Mexico. How do you think it’s gone today?

Jost Capito: “Sebastien has shown a fantastic performance again today. The car performed pretty well too and we’re also impressed with how Jari-Matti came back today and how he performed.”

Q. All Sebastien has to do tomorrow is do exactly what he did all rally – get through the stages. Is he going to slow down at all?

Jost Capito: “If you have quite an advantage you have to be careful not to lose the concentration or the rhythm. So I think he’s doing a very good job there. He says he’s not pushing too hard, he stays in his rhythm and drives the way he feels safe. I think he’ll do exactly the same tomorrow. We won’t ask him to slow down and get out of his rhythm.”

Q. What would it mean to you if you could take another win, two in a row, in your debut year?

Jost Capito: “For sure it would be completely unexpected, but I think that for today we have to say that the competition had quite bad luck too. Mads had really bad luck, it wasn’t his fault and with Mikko having a puncture, that can happen to anybody. It can happen to anybody tomorrow as well. I think we were lucky that we didn’t have any incidents.”

Q. Yves, Mikko Hirvonen is in second place but Thierry Neuville is just 7sec behind after Mikko picked up a puncture on the final stage. How confident are you that he can maintain that second position?

Yves Matton: “I’m sure it will be a difficult day, with the long stage, but from what we saw this weekend we see that Mikko can stay in front. It will be very interesting to follow I think.”

Q. In terms of performance this weekend, how do you think it’s gone? You do have two drivers in second and fourth at the moment, which will be great for the manufacturers’ championship.

Yves Matton: “For the manufacturers’ championship if we finished like that then it’s good, but it’s a little bit more difficult in the drivers championship for sure. We’ve known for a long time that Ogier has the pace, but since the beginning of this year he’s showing something great. We’ll see, last year Mikko was fighting Sebastien Loeb on a couple of rallies and we’re sure he can fight for victories with Sebastien Ogier.”

Q. Malcolm, let’s talk about Mads. A great performance this weekend then the big disappointment when he retired on the road section to the second stage. How is the team feeling about this, and what happened exactly?

Malcolm Wilson: “As you can imagine we’re all feeling very, very disappointed and sorry for what happened because it was a mechanical issue. He had a small clutch problem in the stage that wouldn’t really have affected his time that much. The engineers were discussing with him what we could do and then he noticed that the battery voltage was down. Basically the car was not charging and there was no chance to continue.”

Q. Thierry Neuville is now in third position, just 7.5sec behind Mikko. What is the strategy for tomorrow, are you going to ask him to push or settle for what he’s got?

Malcolm Wilson: “It would be very easy to settle for third. No, we’re going to make the push because he’s not in our main Qatar M-Sport team so it’s not really affecting our manufacturers’ points. We know how to put a little bit of pressure on Mikko, so we will try.”