Pace Notes

Breakfast, just after dawn in the Novotel, Hamilton. The battle lines have been drawn early. There's a red and blue side of the restaurant on Sunday morning. It's the last day of Rally New Zealand and it's Citroen versus Ford. The needle which has been building all year is about to explode on the best roads in the world.

And it's a needle brought about by the current regulations: the old running order chestnut.

Transcending the divides like a sort of world rally united nations, I shake hands with both sides. But not with Sebastien Loeb. He's not here. Ten minutes later and the restaurant empties of the drivers, co-drivers and team personnel. Twelve minutes later, Loeb arrives. He's in a hurry for coffee and a ride to the service park. That wasn't tactics. He just hates getting out a bed a second earlier than he really has to.

Daniel Elena and Jarmo Lehtinen work on their cars during Rally New Zealand © LAT

Tactics were, unfortunately, what Rally New Zealand would be remembered for. Last year, this same event was remembered for the most incredible battle between Loeb and Marcus Gronholm, eventually being decided to the tune of three tenths of a second in the Finn's favour. It would be a different story this time, with Anglo-French relations being put to the sword for the second time in a season.

In Turkey earlier this year, when Ford made no bones about deploying tactics to bring about a Hirvonen-Latvala one-two, Citroen team principal Olivier Quesnel didn't bother to hide his disgust. He made it abundantly clear that his team were not interested in such a vulgar interpretation of the rules.

But then, on a North Island Friday last week, it looked for all the world as though this was exactly what was happening. Going into the last long stage of the day (the last stage where team tactics could be deployed - you're not allowed to do it on a Superspecial), Loeb had a problem. Or did he? We'll never know. The Citroen, mysteriously shorn of the split times - which Ford would need to make a tactical plan - through the afternoon, would not start.

Loeb and his co-driver Daniel Elena hopped out and got under the bonnet. A couple of minutes after they should have checked into the start of the stage, Loeb decided to roll the car backwards and bump start it. The three minutes it took him to make this decision cost him 30 seconds in time penalties. And forced Hirvonen to run first on the road.

Fair or foul? Who knows? It will be debated long and loud for ages. Quesnel swore there was a technical fault with the car. Quite why it took the four-time champions Loeb and Elena three minutes to make a decision which I (without the benefit of four world championships) could have made in three seconds, I have no idea. Bumping the car was the work of a moment and option number one when your car won't start.

Ford's Malcolm Wilson found the whole thing deeply amusing and offered Quesnel a starter motor from one of his ultra-reliable Focus RS WRCs.

You have to be pragmatic about this situation. If Citroen was playing games on Friday, fine. There are no rules against it. But front-up. If not, presumably telemetry is easy enough to lift from the car to illustrate the problem which robbed the car of the capability to beam split times into Hamilton and/or left it silenced at the start of the second part of Waitomo.

This all became utterly academic 24 hours later, after Loeb had been unable to build a big enough lead through day two. He'd wanted 20 seconds over the Finn, but when his advantage stood at 11 seconds, Loeb bottled it and throttled back. Get out of that one, Olivier.

There was no way around this one. Citroen dined on humble pie and pommes frites on Saturday night.

Sebastien Loeb © LAT

Through it all, though, Loeb looked enormously, like, massively, uncomfortable with the whole thing. And it was genuine discomfort. He was big enough to get out of his car and apologise to Hirvonen for his actions. Loeb is a deeply decent fellow and doing what he did went against his competitive instincts.

There's a difference here, see; for Ford the tactics make sense: Hirvonen and Latvala are good, but they're not at Loeb's level just yet. Loeb being Loeb and Citroen being Citroen, they can, justifiably, take the sporting moral high ground. They're more than ready and equipped to take on the best any time and anywhere.

This rule is, for me, complete arse. Yes, we had four drivers in with a shot at winning Rally New Zealand on the final day last week - and that turned into one of the most exciting days the sport has seen, but what sort of damage are we doing to a sport that's about cars being driven as quickly as possible? The World Rally Championship is the pinnacle of the purest form of road racing. It's not about tactics. They belong on the circuit.

I realise I'm over simplifying and undoubtedly incurring the wrath of Mr Wilson, but I well remember Carlos Sainz being truly evangelical about the virtues of the level playing field. "Which," the Spaniard would venture in his inimitable, argue-and-you-will-lose way, "other sport penalises the champion as much as this?"

I was in no place, and had no desire, to argue with him then. And, anybody disagreeing with me should remember that they will incur the wrath of El Matador.

World Rally Championship rallies commission president Morrie Chandler takes a the polar opposite view to Sainz, questioning the sense in taking the lot of the best in the world and making it better. Hmm, I simply don't get that one. Isn't competitive world sport supposed to be aspirational? If you're not good enough, tough. Go away and get better. This isn't some national championship where we handicap the best at the behest of the rest. It's the kick-ass, dog-eat-dog world of global rallying.

The round of applause which greeted Elena's admittance that he and Loeb preferred the fight and subsequent 2007 result on this event to the win they'd achieved courtesy of the "shit tactics" was bang on.

Of more concern was the fellow at customs who questioned the reason for my stay in New Zealand on my way out of Auckland. When I told him, he wasted no time in imparting an opinion devilishly similar to that of Elena.

The voices of discontent are getting louder and they can't be ignored forever.