Standing proud: Rob Huff

Anyone old enough to remember The A-Team - undeniably the greatest of the many soldiers of fortune that populated 1980s television - will recall John 'Hannibal' Smith's catchphrase: 'I love it when a plan comes together'.

In Hannibal's case, the remark invariably followed the team overcoming huge odds to defeat the bad guys, generally via the deployment of a motorbike-mounted bazooka fashioned from cat food tins.

Rob Huff's stellar 2008 season in the World Touring Car Championship featured rather less in the way of explosions than the A-Team tended to produce - something for which RML, which runs the works Chevrolet WTCC programme, will be grateful. But his final result of third in the championship, first of the petrol-powered cars and with two wins including victory in the final race of the season at Macau, was the product of a lot of planning 12 months earlier.

"We worked very hard as a team with the winter development of the Lacetti, we got quite a bit of pace out of it and that obviously worked very well," Huff recalls.

"I think for me it was driveability. It was the first sort of year that my engineer Duncan Laycock and I went down our own route rather than following the Alain (Menu) and Nicola (Larini) route of setting the car up. I stood on my own this year. I'd had two years with Alain and Nicola and a year with Jason (Plato, in the BTCC), and I learned a hell of a lot. 2008 was the year that I was going to stand on my own two feet - become a man!"

By Huff's own assessment, the main area that needed addressing as he prepared for his third season in the world championship was qualifying. The WTCC field can generally be relied on to create some sort of mess at the first corner, and those that qualify somewhere from the fourth row back have a greater than even chance of being caught up in it. Getting things right on Saturday thus became the focus of Huff's 2008 preparations and he found a few different ways to tackle it.

Rob Huff in the Chevrolet Lacetti © XPB

"Going into the start of the season, the one thing I really wanted to work on was my qualifying," he says. "I let the team know about that and they were very good to me through the winter testing last year, giving me pretty much any amount of sets of tyres that I wanted to just go out there and do the one-lap qualifying, the flying laps. So I had a lot of practice at it.

"We worked it out that on average I qualified fourth throughout the season and I think that was a big part of how we ended up still within a shout of the title at the end of the year."

As well as improving his touch with new tyres and forging his own path in set-up terms, Huff also decided that some psychological recalibration was in order.

"I'm not going to give all my secrets away," he says. "But it probably goes back to when I was an instructor at Silverstone and I was working there with Andy Priaulx. I remember turning up for work one day and he had all these books with him, and they were all about mind control and so on.

"I got talking to him about it and it was one of those things where you kind of think, 'Hmmm, does it work or does it not?' And then I looked at it and thought, 'Hang on a minute, that bloke is a three-time world champion so it can't hurt to have a look at it'.

"I spoke to a few people and ended up going on the advice of (RML boss) Ray Mallock. He knew of a guy, so I phoned him up and booked myself in for three days. I found it to be probably three of the most interesting days I have ever spent in a classroom. Instead of just brushing it off to one side afterwards and thinking, 'Well, that was good but I have got better ways', I really took it on board and really put it into practice.

"The concepts are very, very simple, but it is very difficult to actually make yourself do it and put it into practice. I just kept working away at it for weeks and weeks, just trying to find a way of putting it into something that I could understand and put into use myself, and I managed to find the key to it. That key probably wouldn't work on yourself or someone else, but for me that particular thing worked. I got to the first race, got to the first qualifying, and it was, 'Right Huffy, this is it. This is the big one'. And I think we qualified fourth or fifth for the first race."

Despite his new-found qualifying pace, various misfortunes prevented Huff from scoring in either of the first two race weekends, so his season really started at Valencia. It was an unlikely place for a reversal of fortune, given that Huff had never made it past the first corner in any of his previous three visits to the Spanish circuit ("I can truly put my hand on my heart and say that none of it was ever my fault, though," he points out). But from fourth on the grid, he passed the three SEATs ahead of him and drove on to take his first win of the year, following it up with a second behind Menu in the reverse grid race.

Rob Huff finally finished a race in Valencia, and on the podium © XPB

"That was the starting point for my championship," he reflects. "There were 18 points in the bag and it took us straight to seventh in the championship from nowhere. It was like, 'right, that's the belter out of the way, now let's just keep it consistent and try to get nine or ten points every weekend'."

On the whole he managed to do exactly that, although there were weekends where not everything followed the script. One example was Brno, where he finished on the podium only to be disqualified for a technical irregularity.

"We'd been struggling for pace all weekend at Brno, but managed to get a podium after starting ninth in race two, and then unfortunately got disqualified for an infringement with the car," he says.

"It was a rubber washer on a rollbar - completely ludicrous. To the point where, at the next weekend I took the third-place trophy and gave it to Augusto Farfus, and about an hour later he came back and chucked it back at me. He said, 'I've been thinking about it and it wasn't your fault. The rubber washer on the rollbar wasn't something that would gain an advantage, so please have your trophy. You deserved it.' Which I thanked him very much for, and which I have now got at home.

"So it was very disappointing. We'd just kicked off the season well at Valencia, so to go and get stripped of six very important points - we finished third in the championship, one point behind Gabriele (Tarquini). So those six points would have been very useful."

Further disappointment awaited at Brands Hatch, where Huff was on target for a home-track win in his 100th touring car race, only to suffer a puncture while leading with a lap to go. On the flipside, luck certainly had a hand in his extraordinary Macau victory, where he'd been running fourth when James Thompson, Farfus and Tarquini all crashed out in front of him with just a couple of laps remaining.

"How I managed to miss all the debris from Farfus's front wheel rolling down the road, I don't know," says Huff. "I think I actually went underneath Gabriele while he was in mid-air. To avoid James (Thompson) while he was clattering off the wall like a pinball because his car was bent from where Farfus had pushed him into the wall was just pure luck.

"Ok, there was a little bit of skill involved, but I was just sitting there turning left and right, just trying to predict where the tyre was going to roll to, where the bodywork was flying off to, and trying not to run over too much carbon fibre.

Rob Huff leads in Macau © WTCC

"It's swings and roundabouts - I think that almost made up for Brands Hatch. On the day we were running in fourth and I was happy because I was two places ahead of Priaulx - I had to finish one place directly behind him to clinch third in the championship, so I was happy with fourth.

"I wasn't trying to catch the guys in front, but I was catching them on the basis that Farfus and Thommo were messing around and slowing each other down, and then the seas just parted for me. Thommo was in the next wall, the next lap Farfus and Tarquini...

"My engineer saw that I got into the lead because they had the live TV feed and he was screaming at me at there was oil down everywhere. As I came out of the Melco Hairpin I think I had about a 15-second lead, and he was just screaming at me.

"So the next two corners, which are normally fourth gear at 7000 revs, I took at third gear at about 5000 revs, just to make sure we got around them and didn't hit any oil. And then I brought it home to win. I think it was the most I've ever celebrated in a car - I'm glad there wasn't a camera in the car, put it that way. But what a way to finish a really cracking season... the best season of my life, for sure."

The job now is to carry that momentum into 2009; a task that could prove tricky as the team get their head around the new Cruze model.

"We are a little bit behind," Huff admits. "But we have got a few good, solid tests coming up. It's really exciting and I just want to make the most of it. I want to move forward from third in the championship. The guys at RML have worked so hard that I want it for them more than I want it for myself.

"I don't think we could have done any better this year. Just to stop SEAT getting 1-2-3 was important, because that diesel thing... it's ridiculous how quick it was. It really is. I can't emphasis how quick the thing is. They could turn the boost up in qualifying and they'd monster everybody. With 80 kilos of extra weight they'd monster everyone.

"Then they'd turn it back down for the races, but then because they were so quick out of the corner with the turbo diesel, it had so much torque that you couldn't get anywhere near the damn thing to overtake it."

The technical regulations have been tweaked slightly for the 2009 season, with limitations placed upon the SEAT's turbo boost, and BMW looking to benefit from a change to the minimum weights. But Huff believes that it is too early to tell whether the changes will be enough for someone to take the championship away from the Spanish manufacturer.

The 2009 Chevrolet Cruze © XPB

"It is untested," he says. "SEAT are whingeing about it, but they're going to. If I was in a SEAT diesel, I wouldn't want to give anything away, so I can understand why they are jumping up and down as much as they are. But the fact of the matter is that Yvan won the championship by the best part of 35 points. That's three-and-a-half race wins, which is crazy.

"Don't get me wrong, he did drive better than anyone else in the championship, and he had the best machinery. But to win it by that far, I think proves how quick that car was. It was pretty much uncatchable.

A couple of the circuits seemed to suit us better, but anywhere with a straight that was in the region of 150mph, they'd monster everything. So they made it difficult and it was disheartening, so it's nice to see that the FIA have held it back a bit.

"Quite how much of a difference it is going to make... watch this space."