MOTORSPORT: Volkswagen's beautiful set of WRC numbers

Volkswagen has given an unusual but detailed insight into how it won this year’s World Rally Championship — its second straight with its Polo R.

Paul Keating, when delighting in the title of “world’s greatest treasurer”, proclaimed Australia’s national accounts a quarter of a century ago to be “a beautiful set of numbers”.

VW hasn’t exactly invoked that term, but it might well have in explaining how it chalked up 12 victories in the season just concluded, eclipsing Citroen’s previous record of 11.

The German manufacturer said the turbochargers in the 315hp engines in its three Polo R WRCs completed 1.3 billion revs between the Monte Carlo Rally in January and Rally Great Britain that its French dual world champion Sebastien Ogier won on Sunday.

It calculated that Ogier, Finn Jari-Matti Latvala and Norwegian Andreas Mikkelsen changed gears 73,211 times in competition this year.

“Using muscle power alone, the [Volkswagen Motorsport] mechanics lifted a total of 265 tons moving the roughly 1100 tyres used,” VW said.

“The engineers evaluated about 17.9 gigabytes of data from the year’s 249 special stages – roughly the same as 3.2 million pages of pure text.

“The team members covered a total of 96,845.99km as the crow flies between the service parks and the team headquarters in Hannover [about 90km west of VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters].

“The equipment for the overseas races travelled a further 46,202.62km by sea.”
And it added: “All with 100 per cent teamwork.”

Apart from winning all but one of this year’s WRC events — Hyundai was victorious at Rally Germany in August — VW had eight one-two finishes in the season, equalling Peugeot’s eight in 2002.

VW wrapped up the manufacturers’ title at the earliest point in the season for 25 years and will celebrate its success in Wolfsburg this Saturday.

It is only the second manufacturer to have had the top three drivers in a world rally championship — something Lancia did back in 1987 and ’88.

VW won 197 of the 249 stages of WRC events this year — almost 80 per cent — and its drivers were on the podium 23 times. In its two years rallying the Polo R it has had 22 victories and 41 podiums in 26 rallies, and the fastest time on 345 of 486 special stages — almost 71 per cent.

The company said team members from 20 nations worked at the 13 WRC rallies this year that took in 15 different countries, including Australia in September.

Temperatures on the special stages — in the varying conditions from sea level to altitudes of 2781 metres — ranged from minus 12 up to 34 degrees Celsius.

VW claimed 4.2 million fans now follow its works team on social networks, that 101,647 fans were given autographs by the VW drivers and that it issued 703 pages of press releases and 322,488 text messages.

These are an impressive, dare it be said beautiful, set of numbers.

Dare it also be said that Australia’s economy slid into recession a few months after Keating’s immortal words.

VW’s performance in rallying is unlikely to follow that route for at least a good while yet … perhaps it will take a Toyota comeback to the WRC to topple it.