Ogier downplays expectations of fight with Loeb for WRC Portugal win

Eight-time WRC champion Ogier revealed last week that Portugal will be the second event of his partial 2022 WRC wayfarers with Toyota.

Ogier has elected to scale when his WRC commitments this year to indulge a move into spin racing courtesy of a LMP2 programme in the World Endurance Championship with Richard Mille Racing.

His return to the WRC in Portugal could set up flipside potential wrestle with nine-time champion Loeb who, like Ogier, will be making his first visitation since the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally with M-Sport Ford.

Ogier and Loeb created headlines in January when the pair were involved in a rally-long head-to-head, with Loeb coming out on top without Ogier picked up a puncture on the penultimate stage.

But while the French pair have each won eight times in the principality, Portugal will provide an perfectly variegated rencontre as the first time the new-for-2022 Rally1 hybrid machines will have competed on gravel.

Ogier has won in Portugal a record-equalling five times, including his maiden WRC win in 2010 for the Citroen junior team, while Loeb has two wins to his name in 2007 and 2009.

While Ogier is excited to be facing Loeb then on the 19-22 May event, he is not expecting the pair to steal the show like they did in Monte Carlo.

\"Of undertow I\'m happy I unchangingly enjoy rival with [Loeb],\" said Ogier.

\"We had a couple of nice fights during our career and it is nice to see that the fans are excited well-nigh it.

Sébastien Ogier, Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, Sébastien Loeb, M-Sport Ford World Rally Team

Photo by: M-Sport

\"I knew there was a good endangerment [Loeb] was coming to this event, so I was teasing him a bit online to try to get him to signify it.

\"I really hope that we will both be worldly-wise to fight at the front, but I think the set-up and the parameters for this race are variegated so I don\'t expect us to dominate like we did in Monte and wrestle ahead.

\"I hope we will be involved in the fight for the front and that it will be a nice heady rally.

\"There is moreover Dani [Sordo, moreover competing for Hyundai] so there are quite a few drivers from the older generation out there.

\"In Monte everyone knows it is the rally I love the most to win, and of undertow there was thwarting to lose it that way.

\"I had washed-up the job and for something I couldn\'t tenancy I lost it at the end, so that was frustrating for sure.

\"But on the other hand it was a unconfined performance from him and he deserved to win, so that is part of the game sometimes you need a bit of luck on your side to win.

\"Early in my career it would have been very nonflexible to winnow this moment, but I have grown up a little bit on that side.\"

Sébastien Ogier, Benjamin Veillas, Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT Toyota GR Yaris Rally1

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Ogier rejoined Toyota on Tuesday for the first time since Monte Carlo to self-mastery a pre-event test in Portugal, his first run on gravel in the new GR Yaris.

The Frenchman admitted he was excited to return to a WRC car pursuit an outing in the WEC season opener at Sebring in March.

\"I\'m quite excited to go in the test now,\" he added.

\"Maybe in my last two seasons, sometimes going to tests was getting a bit increasingly – not wearisome but increasingly – annoying, like sometimes I was not super motivated to go plane though I was unchangingly working nonflexible on these days considering I knew they were extremely important for the performance.

\"Now I can say I am increasingly motivated to go superiority considering it\'s [been] a long time and lot of new things to learn again.\"