How did this deal come about?

We’ve worked with Prodrive before, when we won the Safari Rally and the [African Rally] championship in 2007, so we talked about this rally and agreed to do it in the car.

Is it a Prodrive car?

Yes. I think it’s the development car which Anders Grondal used on Rally Sweden earlier this month.

What do you know about the Total Tour of Natal?

Actually, not that much. I have done an event in Durban before, but not this one.

What’s going to be the hardest thing about the event?

Undoubtedly doing a rally without having done a recce of the stages before we get there. After a few years in the World Rally Championship, I’m completely used to driving the roads twice and making my own pace notes. The South African Rally Championship uses a system where the organisers make a set of pace notes and you get sent those and a copy of a DVD which shows all of the roads. It’s then a case of sitting down and watching the DVD while going through the notes.

Is their system of notes the same as yours?

They are numeric, so they use a number to define the speed of the corner, but they’re the opposite way around to ours. Where I would have a ‘six-left’ as a really, really fast corner, they have that defined as a really slow one; for  them a ‘one-left’ would be a really fast one.

That’s going to be confusing…

It should be okay, we’re going to turn the notes around. As long as the notes are consistent, we should be okay. Co-driving in Africa is really not like co-driving on the WRC or anywhere else in the world.

Who’s co-driving for you?

Peter Marsh. I had a lot of success with Peter, including winning the Safari. It’s good to be back with an old mate. In fact, there are a lot of old mates on this event, the old team is getting back together again.

What are the roads like on the Tour of Natal?

The stages are all run through sugar cane plantations. The roads are really nice and flowing, following the contours nicely, but you need to rely on the notes quite a lot because the sugar cane has grown so high you can’t actually see where the road goes!

What sort of weather are you expecting?

It’s been raining quite heavily on the stages recently, but it’s supposed to dry up for the rally.

What will the plantation roads be like if it carries on raining?

They could be quite tough, quite muddy, but I’m sure they’ll be okay. From what I’ve been told, the surface is pretty good on this event. And we have a mud tyre option as well, if it gets really bad. The championship runs a control tyre – similar to the WRC. Dunlop supplies two options for this rally, we have the regular tyre and we have the skinny mud version. If the organisers deem it to be bad enough to go for the mud tyre, we’ll use that one.

What about the competition?

There’s going to be plenty of that! I think there’s going to be 19 Super 2000 cars out there – so there will be plenty of competition. There are five works drivers, three in factory Volkswagens and two in Toyotas.

Presumably, those guys know this event quite well?

Probably better than me, I’ve never been here before! Most of the championship regulars will have done this event quite a few times, so they’ll know what they’re doing. We’ll do our thing and see how we go.

And what about after the event?

We’ll see. Nothing is decided for the rest of the year, we’ll make our decisions after this first event.