Rob Huff: Eyes on the big prize

For all their purity, numbers alone can never tell the full story.

The record books will tell you that in the 2011 World Touring Car season, Chevrolet's Rob Huff got off to a record-breaking start (three consecutive poles; four wins from six races), gained momentum over team-mate and main rival Yvan Muller, struck a mid-season wobble that allowed Muller to steal the initiative, and fell just three points short of delivering the world championship despite his taking pole and both wins in the final round at Macau.

What the numbers don't tell you is why things panned out as they did. With Chevrolet representing the only full works effort in the WTCC last year, there was never any expectation that the three Cruzes would face a consistent threat.

But nobody - least of all Muller and Alain Menu - thought that the scrap within the Chevy camp would be so one-sided early on.

"I think what happened over the first few races was a combination of things," Huff says. "Over the last few years we've been getting better and better, and I just felt that in 2011 I was ready to bring it all together; realising where I had made mistakes and analysing it a lot more.

"Not over-analysing things, but just thinking about it enough. I think I found the fine line and just hit the ground running with a lot of confidence."

Huff dominated the Chevrolet stable early on, but was slowly reeled in by Muller

At the end of the third round at Monza, Huff already had a 36-point gap over Muller. Although the Brit retained his position at the top of the standings until September, momentum clearly swung towards the Frenchman some time earlier.

"One of the things I'd learned at that point is that I'd done three [poles] on the bounce [up to Monza], and no-one had ever done that before," Huff says. "I think that maybe I then started to over-analyse things.

"In those first three qualifying sessions, I nailed the lap perfectly. I got everything that I could physically get out of that car. Those laps don't come around very often, but over the last three years they've been coming more and more regularly.

"We hit those three perfect laps, and then I started to think, 'Bloody hell, can we do this again? I'm not sure', instead of just going there and thinking, 'Right, I know I can get pole, I know the car's mega, we're going to tweak a rollbar here or a smidge of camber there, but the car will be mint and we'll just go and get on it'.

"But I'd go there, the car would be mega, I'd make one mistake on my main quali lap, and that one mistake was then enough to allow Yvan to get the next two or three pole positions. And I think that was where we just slipped a little bit. Maybe we over-analysed it a bit too much."

One of the key weapons in Muller's arsenal is his experience. At a basic level, it means that he is rarely faced with a situation that he hasn't encountered before, but perhaps even more crucial is that it's taught him how to deal with the psychological demands of a championship battle.

Huff says over-analysing hurt his momentum © LAT

This, Huff admits, is perhaps the biggest lesson he took from 2011.

"I saw a programme with Freddie Flintoff the other night about sports psychology, and it was brilliant because [cricketer Steve] Harmison was talking about how from the outside everybody looks at you and you've got a nice car, a nice job, you're paid well, but all those sorts of things in reality don't create the perfect life," he says.

"You've got to be right in your head. I think it's very easy, as a sportsperson, to have ups and downs psychologically. The psychological side of sport is probably 90 per cent of success. Being able to control it is the hard bit."

Huff had to handle two very different sides to a title fight last year. The first, as he explained, was knowing how to avoid becoming distracted with trying to maintain his streak while everything was going his way.

The second was being able to remain calm when Muller began reeling him in. In a sense, the fact that the Macau finale was win-or-bust for his title hopes removed all of the pressure.

"My confidence around Macau was high because we've done so well there over the last four years," he says. "I knew what I had to do, didn't put any pressure on myself, went out there, and put it on pole by about half a second.

2011 ended on a high with a double win in Macau © LAT

"I hit the form that I'd had in the beginning of the season, and that gives me a lot of confidence to take into this year. The fact that we started and finished 2011 on such high notes means we can hit the ground running this year.

"And I think the fact that Monza is the first race, where we had pole and a double win... it all helps. A lot of it is psychological."

Chevrolet's disinclination to enforce team orders saved last year's championship from descending into a complete whitewash, even if it did occasionally backfire. ("We're Swiss, French and English," Huff says. "What did you expect?")

Perversely, though, the intensity of the fight between the Chevrolet line-up was another aspect of 2011 from which Huff can draw confidence. Being hit from behind by his team-mate on the way into Parabolica wasn't something Huff would have chosen, but equally it was a sign that Muller recognised him as a genuine threat.

"All three of us have got a lot of respect for each other in that sense, because on our day all three of us are untouchable," Huff says. "The championship was decided by who had the most amount of 'game-on' days, and Yvan just pipped us to it."

Considering how heated things occasionally became, it was remarkable that the team chose not to intervene.

"We as three drivers - and three friends, really - dealt with those incidents ourselves," Huff says. "We didn't need the team to be bringing us in and wagging the finger at us and all of that.

Chevrolet chose not to intervene in what was an intense rivalry © LAT

"We knew that 2011 was going to be really tough, so we made a pact where if anything happens, then if you need 10 minutes to chill out and think about it, or an hour or whatever, then fine, but then let's talk about it, get it all out in the open, get everyone's views, and then hopefully we can get to some sort of middle ground.

"And we did. And I think that's a bit special, to be able to have that sort of relationship with your team-mates. We are all strong-minded, strong-willed... difficult sods at times, all three of us. Very stubborn.

"But I also think that's why we're very good at what we do. It's part of the personality that drives you forward."

But in Huff's case, how far forward can he go? After missing out on his first world championship by just three points, it doesn't take a huge leap to guess what his objectives are this time around. As the saying goes, a goal without a plan is just a wish, but Huff already knows what he has to do.

"I learned a lot in 2011," he says. "I've been struggling to find the word for it, because I'm being asked this by a lot of journalists, and the best I can find is that maybe I'm going to try to be a bit more aggressive.

"But 'aggressiveness' is too strong a word, if that makes sense. So let's say that I'm just going to be a bit more switched-on... and treat the field equally."