The early setbacks that shaped the WRC's greatest driver

As we celebrate 70 years of coverage at Autosport, it seemed only proper to sit down with probably the greatest rally ace of all time. Indeed, it could easily be argued, one of the top drivers in the history of motorsport across every discipline.

Today, Sebastien Loeb is a part-time Hyundai driver. The team gives us all the time that we need and the man himself is sort-of happy to go through the story of how and why he has dominated the rally pages of this magazine since the turn of the century.

'Sort-of happy' because Loeb is in no way ready to join the veterans' tour alongside Stig Blomqvist, Ari Vatanen and all the rest. The prospect of him reminiscing at the Goodwood Festival of Speed is as improbable as Coldplay signing up for a summer season at Butlin's. It's in the nuances of what Loeb says, such as when the subject of his fun-loving co-driver Daniel Elena comes up. How have they spent so long together?

"He always wanted to continue and still wants to continue," Loeb says firmly. "I still continue with him as long as I think he can help me to win."

Rally Turkey, barely a month earlier, had brought Loeb's 921st World Rally Championship stage win and his 119th podium finish in the top flight. This is the part of the story upon which he is keenest to linger: today. Tomorrow, even.

PLUS: Why Loeb has joined forces with an old enemy for Dakar

But there is so much more, such as his record 79 victories and nine titles. His story to this point could be straight from a black-and-white movie of the French New Wave: that of a kid from the col bleu who spends his days as a jobbing electrician but dreams of speed and glory.

"I don't know really why but, when I was young, I was always rallying my mopeds," says Loeb. "I was always going faster than my friends and I always had this passion of taking the corner as fast as possible.

"When I had my driving licence it was a bit the same: I was always going on some little roads or even gravel roads in the fields and driving, sliding, and it was my passion to do the optimal braking with the optimal corner. I don't know from where this came but it was like this."

These youthful escapades were carried out in the countryside around Loeb's home town of Haguenau. The problem was that rallying in France is a sport for sun-kissed southerners based between the Mediterranean and the Alpes Maritimes. For a kid from Alsace with no money behind him, it may as well have been on the moon. But then he heard about the French motor federation's 'Rallye Jeunes' talent contest.

"It was a question of coming to a place and driving around some cones and getting in the different qualifications, and I said: 'OK, that's something that I can do... it's the only race I can afford'!" Loeb shrugs. "So I went there, and there were about 15,000 people... I ended first of this qualification and won the final."

Now, if this story had been given the Hollywood treatment, it would be the start of our hero's road to glory. But the French New Wave movies are filled with the absurdity of human existence.

His aversion to glad-handing and fake smiles cannot be ascribed to arrogance. The very opposite, in fact. Even now, everything about Sebastien Loeb suggests that he is simply more comfortable to let his car do the talking

"The judges selected the second guy because he had more relationships [in the sport] than me," Loeb says. "I had no relationships and so that was not really fair but, OK, I had to accept it."

Loeb went back to the building sites for another 12 months before returning to Rallye Jeunes. Once again, he won everything on his way to the final, but pushed too hard, a mistake dropping him to second. It was all the reason that the judges needed to overlook him again.

At 23 years of age, it seemed as though Loeb's ambitions had run out of road. It's also very telling that, in the year between Rallye Jeunes competitions, he chose to overlook the importance of those relationships that his competitors enjoyed. This aversion to glad-handing and fake smiles cannot be ascribed to arrogance. The very opposite, in fact.

Even now, everything about Sebastien Loeb suggests that he is simply more comfortable to let his car do the talking. Fortunately for him someone was listening. A fellow electrician from Alsace with a passion for rallying, Dominique Heintz, called Loeb out of the blue.

"He told me: 'If you are first of 15,000 people two years in a row, I am sure you are something special. I have a little association; I can manage maybe to help you.'"

Heintz entered Loeb in Class N1 for up to 1300cc 'showroom' cars, at the wheel of his Peugeot 106. To try and gauge if this youngster was indeed a potential star, the boss sat in as co-driver on his debut event, the 1997 Rallye Regional du Florival. They won the class but, Loeb chortles, "he never wanted to come again in the car for a race! Now, if I can take him for a ride in the WRC, he will come. But for a rally I think he was very scared! He didn't know if I'm crazy or I'm really fast!"

Loeb won N1 three more times in 1997 but at the end of the year another co-driver, Christophe Schneider, tendered his resignation in dramatic fashion.

"Because we hit something and we had the rear axle that was bent and so the car was going a bit sideways," Loeb remembers. "And I was fighting for the victory of the category with the bent car and he wanted already to stop during the rally! So, OK..."

Fortunately for Loeb, life in a championship had taken some of the edge off his natural diffidence. Among the characters he met was a Tigger-ish youngster called Daniel Elena.

"We started to know each other because we were sharing some places to sleep, to make it cheaper," says Loeb. "At the end of the last rally in 1997 there was a party and we said, 'Why don't we work together?' And so we started just like that."

The Loeb-Elena partnership joined Citroen's one-make Saxo Kit Car series for 1998, taking three wins. In 1999 they won the championship and the French federation, the FFSA, rewarded them with three Junior WRC outings: they crashed out in Catalunya but won the Tour de Corse and Sanremo.

It was a taste of the big time, but the 2000 season loomed large with insufficient funds to move forward. "We were speaking with Dominique and he said maybe it would be best to do some gravel," says Loeb. "To rent a car and do a French gravel rally championship." I did the first rally, I won it. I did the second rally, I won it. And from that point Citroen said: 'OK, we will start to help you on gravel and we will pay the rest... so I won the French gravel championship."

As a final bonus, Loeb was given the keys to a genuine World Rally machine. This was an ex-works Toyota Corolla that had been put out to pasture, which the FFSA hired for Loeb to contest the Tour de Corse and Sanremo in 2000. The old warhorse provided an intoxicating first taste of the sport's top category.

"It was just incredible to drive, to have this four-wheel-drive car that I could slide in the slow corners and play with the car," Loeb beams. "That was just an amazing feeling."

Ninth and 10th places in these two outings may seem underwhelming by modern standards but don't forget the breadth of the WRC back then. He finished in front of four works WRC cars in Corsica and seven in Sanremo.

"That was the turning point because after that all the teams called me back from my faxes and wanted me to come and join them" Sebastien Loeb on the 2001 Sanremo

A hectic 2001 season followed in which Citroen funded a Saxo in the Junior WRC and the Xsara Kit Car in the French national championship. He won both titles but Citroen chief Guy Frequelin seemed reluctant to discuss the team's WRC programme. With nowhere left to go other than the senior series, Loeb decided to take matters into his own hands.

"I had also tried to get in contact with all the international teams, with Subaru and Mitsubishi and so on," he remembers. "I was sending some faxes I think at this time to try to say, 'I'm here if you need a test driver or anything, I can be your guy'. But I never had any positive answer. Even sometimes no answer."

Eventually a third Xsara WRC was entered for Loeb in Sanremo in 2001 alongside the team's seniors, Jesus Puras and Philippe Bugalski. Starting relatively sedately, Loeb was surprised to be in the top six on day one as the likes of Richard Burns, Markko Martin and both Bugalski and Puras bounced into the scenery.

Fog began to close in on day two and Loeb threw caution to the wind, leapfrogging former WRC champion Didier Auriol in the all-conquering Peugeot 206 WRC for second place and setting the service park alight. "He is from the north, I think maybe they like the fog and the rain," Auriol told reporters, somewhat nonplussed.

On the final day, Loeb set about tearing chunks out of the lead that had been built by Peugeot's asphalt supremo, Gilles Panizzi. On the penultimate stage, Panizzi lost 22 seconds to Loeb but he held out to finish in front by just 11.4s. "The young driver may be even the faster driver," Peugeot's ace conceded. The memory brings a smile to Loeb today.

"That was the turning point because after that all the teams called me back from my faxes and wanted me to come and join them."

Citroen also offered Loeb the whole of its partial WRC programme in 2002 and so he stayed put. The season began with victory on the road in Monte Carlo, although Tommi Makinen was awarded the win after an illegal tyre swap at the final overnight halt. Loeb's first official win came on Rally Germany. His other finishes were 17th on his first visit to Sweden, seventh on the Acropolis and Australia, fifth on his first Safari and 10th in Finland.

Again, this sounds modest, but in 2002 there were six other works teams fielding seven former champions between them. Then Citroen decided to level the playing field by hiring both Carlos Sainz and Colin McRae for its first full season in 2003, which gave the young star pause for thought.

"For me I think the time when I had the most pressure was in 2003," he says. "I had Colin and Carlos joining the team, and I knew, 'Now I will know who I am, really'."

Loeb led home an historic 1-2-3 for Citroen in Monte Carlo but the prospect of being measured against his team-mates on gravel worried him. "In 2002, Colin beat me in Greece by one minute in some stages," he recalls of the 1995 world champion's speed.

McRae was the fastest Citroen driver in Sweden and Sainz won round three in Turkey, but neither of the former champions were truly at home in the computer-controlled era of the early Noughties. Loeb's great strength in these early years was to accept the opinion of this electronic wizardry rather than fighting the car. His progress was less crowd-pleasing than the old guard, but on the flat-out gravel stages of New Zealand he once again led Citroen.

"Then I knew, OK, I am in front of two world champions in the same car, that's good news!" he laughs.

The only other driver to really get on top of the computer-generated performance of these cars was the man whom Loeb declares was his greatest career rival: double champion Marcus Gronholm.

"I had a lot of big fights with him and it was quite intense until the end quite often," recalls the 46-year-old. "Sometimes he was doing a mistake before the end so then it was fine, but sometimes we had some big, big fights.

"It was important not to listen too much what he tells you before the last stage!" adds Loeb, sighing. "I remember in Germany [2003] when he told me, 'OK, now you've won, it's OK, we will go easy on the last stage'. I had something like an 11s lead, something like this, and at the split time he was already seven ahead! So I had to change my rhythm until the end of the stage. Yeah, he was a funny guy!"

"On Tarmac it was a bit more exciting to drive the two-litre. A bit more technical because of the torque in the slow corners; you had to manage more the throttle to keep the car and not to slide too much" Sebastien Loeb

After losing out to Petter Solberg by one point in 2003, Loeb began his domination of the sport in 2004, taking his Xsara to six wins on his way to the crown. Try as he might, the closest that Gronholm came to unseating Loeb was in 2006. The cars were shorn of their electronics in a bid to cut costs and Citroen had withdrawn from the WRC, leaving Loeb to run in a factory-supported Xsara with Kronos Racing.

Gronholm was in his first season with Ford and its all-new 'Mk2' Focus WRC, but Loeb scampered to eight wins and four second places, building a 35-point margin with a maximum 40 left on the table. Then he fell off his bicycle and was forced to sit out the rest of the year. Gronholm won in Turkey, but in Australia he rolled on the third stage, losing 10 minutes.

"It was the most special [championship] to win, I would say, but not the most exciting when you just wake up and take your coffee and 'OK I'm world champion now'," Loeb says.

This was also the period in which he began to look beyond the WRC. In 2005, Henri Pescarolo invited Loeb to join his squad for the Le Mans 24 Hours.

"I just did two tests and then sitting in the car and fighting for the win," he says matter-of-factly. "We were leading and my team-mate crashed and the next year we finished second overall. So that really was a great experience to be there, driving in the night... really cool. And to be driving with these aerodynamics, that was something that I didn't know before, so it was a great sensation of speed in the corner."

Even more speed and more 'aerodynamics' were to come. In 2007 Loeb did a seat-swap with Renault Formula 1 driver Heikki Kovalainen. The whispers coming from Paul Ricard were that this was more than just a PR job: the rally guy was impressive.

In 2008, Loeb appeared at the end-of-season F1 test in Barcelona, setting the eighth fastest time in a Red Bull RB4. Mid-way through the following season, sister team Toro Rosso wanted to dump Sebastien Bourdais and Loeb threw his hat in the ring. A credible F1 debut at 35 years of age? All those involved agreed it was eminently possible. All, that is, except for his 'day job' employer Citroen... which nixed the deal.

In mid-2009, Citroen's world was in turmoil. Its star driver had taken his eye off the ball, allowing Ford's Mikko Hirvonen to keep the drivers' title fight alive to the last round in Wales.

The FIA had meanwhile announced that the WRC would move to Super 2000 rules from 2011. This was a blatant attempt to lure Fiat, Proton, Opel, Peugeot, VW and Skoda away from the S2000 Intercontinental Rally Challenge to the WRC, where only Citroen and Ford remained.

Loeb stated that S2000 would reduce both the spectacle of the WRC and its appeal to him as a driver. Fearing that he may bow out, Citroen began to focus on its promising junior driver, Sebastien Ogier, handing him development of the new DS3 in 2010 while Loeb cantered to his seventh straight WRC crown, his fourth in the C4. In the end, Loeb stayed on for 2011 and discovered that he rather enjoyed the new cars.

"On Tarmac it was a bit more exciting to drive the two-litre," he admits. "A bit more technical because of the torque in the slow corners; you had to manage more the throttle to keep the car and not to slide too much.

"The 1600 was better on gravel. I enjoyed more the DS3... than the [two-litre] C4 on the driving side because it was much more agile and you could play much more with the car. So it was much more fun to drive at the end."

The driving may have been fun but with two roosters in the hen-house, life soon became fractious chez Citroen. Loeb dug deep (both drivers won five times) and claimed his eighth consecutive championship while Ogier stalked away, clearing the path to Loeb's final title in 2012. Tellingly, the one mention of Ogier in our conversation is prompted by a throwaway question.

The nine-time champion is now principal of Sebastien Loeb Racing (managed by none other than Dominique Heintz). Autosport asks Loeb to pick a WRC team to win and, secondly, the team that would have more fun than anyone else in the service park.

Around the world, millions will tell their grandchildren about the days when Sebastien Loeb was in action, but for the man himself there is one weekend that crowns them all: the 2010 championship decider

"As team boss [to win] I would say Guy Frequelin. He was the guy... who was managing the team in a very strict way," Loeb says. "For the drivers it's tricky... let's say Ogier and Thierry Neuville with Frequelin as the team boss."

It sounds like a solid choice, but who would he want to rally with most?

"Ah, the guys that I meet often in the parties. I had some fun with [Yves] Matton, no? The boss? I also take Daniel. I can put him in a car so he can drive and have fun and have a party at the end. And Colin McRae, yeah for sure. Team Fun!"

Around the world, millions will tell their grandchildren about the days when Sebastien Loeb was in action, but for the man himself there is one weekend that crowns them all: the 2010 championship decider.

"Where I won it at home in the French rally in Alsace," he says. "In my home town with my friends. That was just amazing."

And we're back to the French New Wave, with the col bleu kid back on the streets where he grew up. But this time he is clutching the prize he left home to chase. The celebrations with those old friends must have been something else.

"It was a great evening I think. I don't remember!"

So the greatest really is human after all.