CarBuyer takes you behind the scenes with Team Volkswagen Motorsport, hands down the most successful outfit in the gruelling World Rally Championship

PORTO, PORTUGAL — If you intend to enter the World Rally Championship (WRC), as Toyota does in 2017, the team to gun for is Volkswagen Motorsport. Since its entry in 2013 with the Polo R WRC, the team has never been beaten in either the driver’s championship or the crown for manufacturers.

Jost Capito, the team principal, likes it that way, to put it mildly. “Winning is everything,” he says. “Second is nothing.”

In one sense then, Sebastien Ogier — world champion with VW in 2013 and 2014 — personally gained nothing in May’s Rally Portugal. He finished second there.

But for Volkswagen itself, the rally weekend had been far more fruitful. Alongside Ogier on the podium were Andreas Mikkelsen and Jari-Matti Latvala, two rival drivers… from Volkswagen. The Polo had delivered a 1-2-3 for the team, the third time the Hanover-based outfit had scored such a result. As a rallying machine, then, the little hatchback is fast becoming a legend.

Rally cars in general are nothing to sniff at, mind you. Each one of VW’s Polo R WRC cars starts life as a regular road model, plucked off the production line at a VW factory in Spain, and is then sent to the team’s base. There, they are completely gutted and undergo a transformation estimated to cost US$1 million.

Yet, the secret to a rally machine’s speed isn’t brute force. The Polo R WRC’s 1.6-litre turbo engine produces 318 horsepower, while the cars have a minimum weight of 1.2 tonnes, so there are Porsches and Ferraris that are quicker. The Polo reaches 100km/h in 3.9 seconds — fast but not quite furious — and it is geared for a top speed of around 200km/h, which is all the performance needed in the narrow, twisty Special Stages.

But no Ferrari can fly through the air like one. And the rough conditions that rally cars endure would break a Formula One car into pieces.

Their suspension is especially sophisticated. Cornering speeds are much higher now than in the 80s, when the cars were more than twice as powerful, so the cars are much faster overall.

They can fly further, too. “The old cars bounced three times after a jump,” says Luis Moya, a retired co-driver from Spain, who is himself a legend for navigating compatriot Carlos Sainz to two WRC titles. “Now you can land on one wheel and it doesn’t matter.”

But that doesn’t mean the WRC cars are easy to drive. “Most people think that rally drivers are just sitting on their ass, turning the steering wheel a little bit,” laughs Andreas Mikkelsen, the 25-year-old Norwegian who drives the VW team’s third Polo.

The temperature inside the car’s cabin can get up to 70 degrees Celsius, he says, and driving flat-out is taxing.

“A couple of years ago I had a heart rate monitor. Just by ‘sitting still’, I had a maximum of 198 beats per minute, and an average of 160,” says Mikkelsen. “It’s a lot of adrenaline while we’re driving, and you have to keep your concentration level all the way through a long stage or a long rally. We do a lot of training, and it’s more demanding than most people think.”

Mikkelsen has yet to win his first WRC event, but at Portugal he was feeling upbeat. The Polo R WRC was upgraded this year, and that weekend was the first time he’d had a chance to drive it competitively.

“For my driving style, I like the new car better because it’s a little more loose in the rear, so it creates a slide a little bit more easy,” he says. “It also has more power and the gearchange is on the steering wheel so I find it better.”

But the Polo’s real trump card, he says, is that it is kinder on its footwear than rival cars. “The Polo is very, very good with the tyres compared to the cars from Citroen, Hyundai and Ford. They have like slick tyres coming in, and we still have a lot of rubber left,” he says.

That is something only the most observant rallying fan might have spotted on his own, and it’s one example of a challenge for WRC in general.

“The problem of the WRC is that when we are out there, it’s not so easy to film and we can’t have all the time everything live. It’s getting better, but still it’s challenging to bring it to the people,” says Jari-Matti Latvala who drives Car #2. “In Formula One, everything is live and you know exactly what’s happening at that point.”

That means the cameras rarely pick up the drivers’ best moves, which could be why F1 receives all the glamour. Yet, the rally driver’s job seems tougher by far.

“Rally drivers have to operate on a lot more different surfaces and get used to the surface changes. But for sure we don’t go at the speeds that they are going on the track where they go at 300km/h,” says Latvala.

Even if WRC as a sport is tougher to follow than Formula One racing, winning there does serve a wider purpose for carmakers like Volkswagen. The company exists to sell cars, after all, and its aim in entering the sport is to pick up technologies that can one day make regular VWs better, and to promote itself amongst the sport’s fans.

When Petter Solberg became WRC champion with Subaru, says Andreas Mikkelsen, the Japanese brand’s sales in Norway doubled in a year.

“At the end of the day, the rally car is a Volkswagen Polo. It’s a car for young people, and to build a link with them, rallying is the way to go,” says Luis Moya. After Portugal, the Polo R WRC won Rally Italy and won again at Rally Poland — both times with Sebastien Ogier. 

Between the sport’s fans, its current champion and the marketing men from VW, it’s tough to decide who must love the car the most.

For a deeper look at the WRC and Team Volkswagen Motorsport, pick up CarBuyer 235 — on newsstands now!