Citroens tyre tactics stun rivals

Date published : 19 Aug 2011 - 14:48:19

A revolutionary approach to tyre choice helped Citroen to take an early lead in the Rallye Deutschland today.Faced with a difficult choice of hard or soft Michelins for the loop of three stages, both Sebastien Loeb and Sebastien Ogier departed service with four soft tyres but then swapped and fitted hard covers to the left side of the DS3 WRCs only. The first stage was driven with the car in this configuration before the crews switched to four soft tyres for the rain-hit second stage."It was difficult this morning," said Loeb. "But, you know that you are going to lose some grip if the soft tyre overheats, so instead of losing all of the grip at the front or the rear, we ran the tyres on one side. It worked. We had run like this in testing."Some of Citroen's rivals thought the French team had made a mistake, but Mikko Hirvonen said he would be running a set-up like this at Ford's next asphalt test."It's something to think about," said Hirvonen. "I hadn't heard of this before, but it's obviously worked for them, so, yes, we will try it next time. It wouldn't be easy to drive the car, particularly on corners going in one particular direction, but at least you would have some grip."Michelin's motorsport director Nick Shorrock said he was surprised by Citroen's move as well, saying: "I hadn't seen it before, but it gives an extra element to the competition."Citroen team principal Olivier Quesnel added that he had done it with the factory Peugeots at this year's Monte Carlo Rally.With sunny and dry conditions now prevailing until the end of the event, the factory cars are all expected to run on hard tyres on each of the remaining loops.