What have you been doing with your week in Britain?

I was up in Cockermouth at M-Sport for the week – and it was freezing!

Were you working on the car?

The team was just finishing the car off, putting some nightshifts in, so we were helping out a little bit. ‘Dobs’ [team engineer Mark Doppelfeld] was over with me to take a look at the car. It was a good chance to take a look at everything, go through the data and talk to the engineers.

What do you think of the car?

It looks awesome – absolutely stunning! It’s not that surprising though, when you see the M-Sport set-up, that’s equally impressive.

And they don’t seem to be going badly either…

I know. That’s why I can’t wait to get in the car and drive it properly. We’re going to fly to Johannesburg, where a lot of the team are ready to work on the car and get it sorted, before we drive down to Cape Town for the event. After that, the team is going to be based in Zimbabwe.

What are your first impressions of the Fiesta compared with the Citroen C4 WRC you drove last year?

The Fiesta is definitely more simple. Take something simple like the wiring loom, on the C4 last year, the loom was incredible – so much stuff on there. But with the Fiesta, it’s simplified; you’re not allowed as many sensors or electronics on these cars. I actually prefer the car like this, it’s a much more involving drive. You have to get on the car and really drive it, rather than the car driving you some times. At the same time, with less electronics involved, there’s a small chance that if something goes wrong with the car, then you have half a chance of fixing it yourself. The Fiesta looks quite easy to work on.

What about under the bonnet?

Well, there’s certainly more room under the bonnet on this car than there ever was in the Citroen! The other great thing is the suspension travel, there’s loads of it!

That’s good news for Africa…

Exactly. We’ll be able to ride all of the bumps and jumps back home much better with this car. And it’s 100 kilos lighter. Talking about it now makes me want to drive it even more!

What’s the plan for this year?

I’m definitely doing the South African and Zimbabwe Championships, which means about another 15 rallies or something like that. On top of that, I want to do a lot of testing as well. This is something I feel I missed out on last year, there wasn’t enough seat time for me to get used to the car. This is what this year’s all about. The regulations for the new World Rally Cars will be based on the Fiesta, the Fiesta WRC will be essentially the same car but with a 1.6 litre turbo engine in, which means I have a good chance to get some really good experience of the kind of car we’ll be using next year, this year.

So the plan is to go back to WRC?

Definitely. But we’ll go back having done a whole lot of rallies and testing with the car this season. Testing-wise, everything is quite different in Africa; we have so much different terrain. We have fantastic forest stages, loads of gravel roads – it’s great. If we want to run a 20-kilometer test stage, that’s no problem, but that’s unheard of in Europe.

And what about the WRC this year?

We might be doing one or two world rallies or IRC rallies at the end of the season to see how our pace stacks up. But, at the moment, our focus is on learning the car in Africa. We’ll take a view on what we do later in the season mid-way through the year.