Eight-time World Rally Champion Sébastien Ogier opens up about life, love, success and his son in a fascinating new documentary.
The end of Sébastien Ogier's final full-time season in the World Rally Championship didn’t play out precisely as he’d have planned. But the outcome, well, that was just as he wanted it to be.
With three rounds left to go and a 44-point lead in the 2021 World Rally Championship season, Ogier and co-driver Julien Ingrassia had a decision to make. What to do?
Should they play it safe?
No.
Send it.
You can see how it all played out in the new documentary, Sébastien Ogier: The Final Season, in the player above.
That's the attitude a driver needs to win a single World Rally Championship, never mind seven. Still, aggression can cut both ways in a sport marked by centimetres and seconds. A troubled Rally Finland followed by an indifferent race in Spain, and suddenly Ogier's Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans had slashed the point gap to just 17 points with only the Monza finale remaining.
Forget centimetres, the final round came down to millimetres. It looked perilous for a moment, but the Frenchmen managed to achieve their goal at Rally Monza in Italy – their seven championship titles became eight. Ogier delivered brilliantly at a time when others might have taken a more cautious route. He and Ingrassia were rightly crowned.
Ogier through the years
The captivating new documentary – which is available in full now – charts Ogier’s career in a way never seen before.
It’s easy to focus on the highs at the expense of the lows. Such an approach would have done the Gap star an injustice. Take the 2011 season as an example.
Having been installed alongside Sébastien Loeb in the Citroën factory squad, Ogier stood his ground and demanded equality in his contract. Then didn’t get it. He wasn’t willing to stand for that and made waves where his predecessor Dani Sordo had simply accepted his fate. Compromising wasn’t an option. Even if it cost him his career. Ultimately, it cost him his seat.
At the time, he might have come across as confrontational. Looking back, his insight is both measured and insightful.
“I dared to take on the Loeb icon,” he says in the film. “Often, people would say to me: '2011 wasn’t a good year for you'. Everyone was trying to make me say negative things. I only remember the positive. It was very formative for me.”
It was a season that made him a true driver and formed him as a competitor.
He departed for Volkswagen Motorsport, a steel-edged challenger who’d taken on and beaten the best. He was now ready to be the best.
When the car is a perfect fit
When the Polo R WRC arrived, Ogier used it with deadly accuracy, locking down four titles in four years. In those seasons, he demonstrated the natural instinct he’d adored in his childhood hero Ayrton Senna. Like the Brazilian, Ogier’s method wasn’t always popular among his contemporaries, but nobody could touch him between 2013 and 2016. Nobody could even get close to him.
Now writing his own records, Ogier’s character evolved, and the genuine emotion at Volkswagen’s departure at the end of 2016 was a testament to that. The German car giant’s decision to end its WRC programme offered Ogier an opportunity to further demonstrate the universal application of his talent.
Four more titles would come, two apiece with M-Sport Ford and Toyota. Those two couldn’t have been more disparate operations: Malcolm Wilson’s family-run outfit versus the world’s biggest carmaker. Going to M-Sport was a gamble in 2017. Toyota was already there, holding out its hand with a potentially more lucrative contract.
Ogier saw the look in Wilson’s eye and knew. The Fiesta WRC was the car for him. He was right. In winning back-to-back titles with the Briton, they cemented a friendship and memories that will last a lifetime.
A Citroën return for 2019 didn’t play out the way anybody wanted, but two years with Toyota delivered the perfect end to this chapter of an already glittering career.
There's more to Ogier than his many titles
Charting the journey of an eight-year-old tearing up his parents’ backyard in a lawnmower-engined cross kart across the next three decades offers a rollercoaster ride as Ogier’s passion for the sport is matched only by his determination to succeed.
Here at the end, times have changed. Ogier has changed. Yes, he’s an eight-time world-beater, but he’s now Pappa Ogier too.
It’s family time now.
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