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When four-time world rally winner Francois Delecour woke this morning, his dream became reality: he started his first ever World Rally Championship stage in a Porsche 911 RGT. The Tuthill Porsche-prepared 911 didn’t miss a beat through the opening day’s seven stages.
As was the case throughout the day, Delecour’s Below Zero-backed Porsche was greeted with mass appreciation. The crowd went wild for number 92. Unfortunately, there was little chance of Francois hearing them over the six, booming cylinders sitting right behind him. Even more unfortunately, there was little chance of him hearing his co-driver Dominique Savignoni for much of the day either after a fault was discovered in the intercom system installed in Delecour’s crash helmet.
Just as it had on its World Rally Championship debut, the Porsche ran faultlessly through the opening day’s action, allowing Delecour to engage in a fascinating fight with factory Porsche World Endurance Championship pilot Romain Dumas, who is driving a four-litre 911.
“I tell you, I really have dreamed of this day,” said François. “It’s fantastic. More than fantastic to be here at Rallye de France Alsace with a car like this. Today has been good. OK, we have the problem with the intercom and, for a driver, that is frustrating. It’s so, so important to be able to hear your co-driver calling the pace notes. It’s vital. This cost us some time today. Dominique and I tried to switch our crash helmets and that helped. But the main thing is that we are here and we have driven this fantastic car down some incredible roads. And we have made some people smile. We have made many people smile. Including me.”
Richard reckoned that the intercom problem cost us around twenty seconds. “The gap between the two Porsches at the end of the day is half a minute. Like François says, the big thing is that we are here competing in this fantastic category and showing what these cars are capable of. Our car is in the top 20 and really mixing it with the R5 category cars: exactly where we thought the car should be.
“Once again, we’ve seen a huge response to the Porsche and what’s also really interesting is that we have the chance to back-to-back our car with Romain’s. We’re running the 3.8-litre engine, while he has the 4.0-litre. From what we’ve seen from the split times and the nature of the stages, it looks like his car might be giving more torque than ours. This is all useful data as we forge ahead with a brand new category of rallying.”
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