FIA AFRICAN RALLY CHAMPION, 2007
| Q & A with Conrad |
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Why rallying? My dad used to compete. The sport has always been in my blood. What’s your best memory of that time? Dad drove a Toyota Supra rally car, and I used to go out to the tests with him, sitting on the fuel tank in the back and hanging on to the roll cage while he was testing. What was your first event? It was a round of the Zimbabwean Championship. I was using a 1600cc Toyota Corolla. How much experience did you have? Not much. It was two months after my 16th birthday. Mom did the recce with me and then dad co-drive. How did you get on? Okay. Okay? Hmm. There was a one kilometre straight after the start of the first stage, followed by a gate. As I was closing on the gate, I saw there was a cattle grid alongside the gat. I called to dad: “Cattle grid or gate?” He shouted: “Gate, go through the gate!” He hadn’t looked up from the notes; the gate was closed. But, given that this was my first event, I was in no position to argue. I drove straight through the gate. I don’t think dad was too impressed. He told me to do it, though. How did the event end? We were seventh overall. A great result for time out. Did you and your dad compete together for a long time? We did a few events together, but it came to an end with a bit of a bump. For dad. Dad did the first full year in the Zimbabwean Championship with me, but then he got too scared. He kept on braking for me on his side of the car and then he’d be grabbing the roll cage in the middle of the stage. I kept telling him: “If we go over, you’re going to chop your fingers off...” He taught me loads about how to drive the car, which was great – because, in all honesty, he wasn’t so hot on reading the notes. Tell us more about this, “bit of a bump...” It was raining really hard and the windscreen started to mist up. Dad undid his belts and leaned across to clean my side of the screen. I just couldn’t see a thing. That was probably why I crashed into a tree. Dad went straight into the windscreen. It was then that he called it a day! He wasn’t happy. He was ready to stop co-driving then. Your first championship was in 2002, tell us about that? It was the Zimbabwean Championship. I won it, aged 18, driving the Corolla. A couple of years later I won the African Championship. We’d modified the Corolla in to Group A and we were beating a lot of the big Group N cars. I did the Safari that year as well. You won the Safari Rally last season (2007) that must have been incredible... It was great. Growing up in Africa, the Safari Rally is the big one. It’s the rally everybody knows. We had a good programme in Africa with Subaru and John Lloyd (a British-based backer), but, really, I didn’t think we could win the Safari Rally. I mean, it’s the Safari for goodness sake – it’s an event I’ve grown up around, the biggest motorsport event in all of Africa. And it was a round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge, which meant you were up against factory teams, right? When we arrived in Nairobi for the start of the Safari, seeing Fiat and how they’d arrived I was actually shocked. Fiat had made such a massive effort for the event and we were seeded quite a long way down on the road. Fiat had the proper mousse tyres and all the right bits. It was an amazing achievement. Winning the Safari was not only great for that moment, but it was also a great boost for the African Championship – which we went on to win. By then you were already a familiar face in the Junior World Rally Championship. When I arrived in Monte Carlo for the first round in 2004, we were completely unprepared. We hadn’t planned anything particularly well, we didn’t really know much about what we were up to – looking back we made some mistakes. We didn’t know any better. That first year was a disaster – we didn’t finish one event with the Puma. But, we knew if we could just get a half-decent car and some time in that car, it could work for us. We’d had some fastest stage times in the first year, but it was quite tough. What about the next year? We switched to the Citroen Saxo and started our programme in Mexico. The Saxo was great, but there was a feeling that we should stay with the current car and move to the C2, which we did in time for the next round in Sardinia. Citroen was working really hard on the C2, but they had factory drivers to support and some of the latest revisions to the car didn’t get to us, so our car wasn’t quite as good. We had some big accidents trying to push the car along that season. Then it was the Renault for 2006? We went to Renault with British team Geoff Jones Motorsport. That was a great car and a really good team. I moved to Wales to be close to the team, which was good for me. I was working on the car with the team and Geoff was helping me as a driver. I also got together with David Senior for the first time. Everything was really starting to work. David helped me a lot that year, he has so much experience. We spent a long time working on the notes. I wasn’t really driving to the notes, coming from Africa, I was reading the road rather than listening. I used to hate the recce and making notes, but now I really work at it. I don’t think pace notes are ever perfect for a stage, there’s always small revisions which you can make and that’s what we’re still doing now. We didn’t have any accidents that year and we had some good results – we found consistency that year. But last year, it was back to Citroen – a pretty good decision, by all accounts... Yeah, we went back to PH Sport – it made sense with PH having such close ties with Citroen. Last year we were completely out of luck. We had problems at the start of the season, but then things started to improve. Finland was where things started to change, though. Patrik Sandell was leading by about 10 seconds, but we were closing on him. Until we got a puncture. That puncture ripped out the brake lines and everything like that. It was really tough at the time. I really wanted to win that event. Disappointed as you were, people had been watching hadn’t they? It seems so. It was at that time that Guy [Frequelin, Citroen Sport team principal] and Yves Matton [customer team manager] started to talk to us about this season. I think it was after Ouninpohja stage, where we’d been going well and – on the split times – we had taken the lead of the event. It was a great boost for me to have Guy coming to talk to me. And that’s how you ended up in a PH Sport Citroen this season. That’s it. |