The farce that kept 2017 VWs out of the WRC

Jari-Matti Latvala stepped from his car, paused for a moment, then put both hands on the roof and lowered his head. Silent prayer? Quite possibly. This was Coffs Harbour at the end of Rally Australia last year.

Like his Volkswagen Motorsport colleagues, emotions were running high for Latvala. There was genuine disbelief on his face. The end of the road had been reached.

And what about the road less travelled? What about the road to 2017? More importantly, what about the car they would be driving down that road?

"I can't believe I will never use that car in competition," says Latvala. "It was the best rally car I ever drove."

Undoubtedly, the Finn was caught in the moment. His new employers at Toyota would likely be less than impressed to talk in such terms now - but those words came when he was standing in Volkswagen overalls saying goodbye to a team. And to a dream.

Volkswagen's departure from the World Rally Championship was bad enough. But what actually made the job worse was the lack of a clean break. Within weeks of the Wolfsburg announcement, speculation began that the Polo R WRC 2017-specification could be coming anyway.

The requisite millions would need to be found from a source outside of Hannover, but homologation was back on the cards for what had become known as the fastest rally car ever to be born, but never to live.

When Subaru departed at the end of 2008, it went. No ifs, no buts. Gone.

But for Volkswagen there was that curious decision to continue testing the car even though the decision had been made. Marcus Gronholm drove two of what would be the most pointless - but deeply exciting - days of his life in northern Sweden to "sign the project off".

Volkswagen assured us it was just being diligent, virtuous. It didn't take long for folk to look beyond that. The other teams were even more cynical and curious.

From early December we went into some sort of limbo. Privately, it was happening. The '17 car wouldn't be in Monte Carlo, but it would be up and running from Sweden onwards. The money was coming, the deal done.

Progress was then reportedly slowed by Middle Eastern interest from Qatar - suddenly everybody wanted a piece of the action. This meant the January 1 homologation deadline passed. Technically, the car couldn't now be passed legal for competition.

So, closure.

Not quite. There was then the news that the FIA was willing to consider an extraordinary homologation of the car. If the other manufacturers were willing to allow the Polo to be passed legal, it could still come to the party.

Such a motion was tabled in Monaco days before the start of the season. The World Rally Championship held its breath - and nobody more so than Andreas Mikkelsen.

Volkswagen's Rally Australia-winning star would be one of the first 'privateers' aboard the car.

Understandably, the other teams wanted to know how Volkswagen would go about pairing the various components on cars; they wanted to know how the testing rules would apply. They wanted more and more detail. Detail that couldn't be sourced in a meeting with no representation from Volkswagen.

Another two weeks passed before the answer arrived.

In that time, there was also talk that Sebastien Ogier had stalled completing his M-Sport deal in December in an effort to land a private Polo. He has since denied such talk, but it would have made for a hugely exciting prospect.

But in the end, the answer was no.

It's still quite hard to take in. We really will never see that car in action. We never will know just how fast Volkswagen's latest rally weapon was. And we'll never know whether the manufacturer would have retained its crown or whether it would have been dethroned by Hyundai. Or even Toyota.

In some ways, maybe it's better for Volkswagen this way. Sure, right now it won't feel like that, but as it stands the Polo won 43 of the 52 world rallies it started. And Volkswagen led the manufacturers' championship for 1346 consecutive days.

But what about the Volkswagen story? What about the Facebook page that had grown from 51,759 fans on day one to more than 5.4 million four years later?

Well, they'll have to join the rest of us and lump it.

I feel for all of the boys and girls at Volkswagen. And I really feel for team principal Sven Smeets. Sven's a rally man and in landing the big job, he landed his dream job.

There was a brief period - probably around the time that Smeets was celebrating the arrival of the new year - when he thought things could come good. Maybe he would be in Sweden showing off the quickest thing ever to come out of Hannover.

It wasn't to be. Talking to him to offer commiserations shortly after the second round of the championship earlier in February, Freddy Loix's former co-driver was surprisingly upbeat.

"I surprised myself a little bit in Sweden," he told me. "I was not thinking all of the time, 'What is going on? What is happening?'

"In our hearts we are motorsport fans - I've worked pretty much all of my life in this sport - so we are following what is happening in the World Rally Championship. This will never change.

"We are already now really busy with other projects, with the very beginning of the Polo R5 car and with our association in [hiring out 2016] World Rally Cars.

"We have moved on. There is no frustration now, just the desire to start racing again and start our next chapter

"We have two Polo R WRC 2017s in the factory. We were working with the FIA to try to find a way to bring these cars to competition in 2017 and we were talking with teams who wanted to use them - so we had to keep pushing and keep building these cars. Now though, the work has stopped and the cars are sitting quietly.

"We have no plans to do anything with the 2017 Polos, nothing will happen with them."

Two Polo R WRC 2017s sitting quietly in the factory. How insane is that?

Such waste is borderline criminal. Quite possibly the fastest rally car ever known to man will never have the clutch dropped in anger.

What a missed opportunity; what a farce that the FIA couldn't find a way through the bureaucracy. Admittedly, the WRC's looking healthier now than it has done for years in terms of manufacturer participation, but a couple of Polos - even privately run - would have been the icing on the cake. Instead, there's intransigence from the governing body and utter and understandable frustration from the promoter.

Or so I thought. Don't get me wrong, the promoter bit's bang on - they are irritated as hell. But it appears the FIA's not far behind them. Publicly FIA rally director Jarmo Mahonen is going to say all the right words: they all tried very hard, but common ground couldn't be found and rules, at the end of the day, are rules.

But I'm told the FIA shares the promoter's vexation. The real immoveable objects here were the other teams.

While Volkswagen was in, the pay off for its global domination was the mass promotion of its success. The rest of the teams were happy enough to surf the wave created in Volkswagen's wake. But when the teams faced the prospect of the car coming unaccompanied by the marketing budget, the welcome wasn't quite the same.

It's a shame. Give it a couple of months and Volkswagen's impact and absence will have faded. The Polo's record will remain written in history forever, but sport moves on with little consideration or consolation for those left behind.

As well as its legacy, Volkswagen will leave one question forever unanswered.