Your complete 2017 Monte Carlo Rally round up

Everyone loves the Monte Carlo Rally, but the sheer capriciousness of its weather and stages means it seldom says much about the likely form for the rest of the season. This year more than ever, the imponderables cascaded on top of each other.

We had two new works teams out of four in the WRC. Inevitably, drivers freshly signed, and the world champion moving too. Ultra-spectacular cars thanks to new rules: more power, more grip, active diffs, wider tracks, massive extra downforce. Plus, more so than in the past 20 years, a crazily unpredictable mix of conditions. Dry tarmac giving way to treacherous slush and uneven black ice – often in the course of the same hairpin.

And yet, funnily enough, Sebastien Ogier won the thing. Ogier had signed for Malcolm Wilson's M-Sport team of Fiestas just a month before. He'd been driving VWs for years, but when they departed the sport after a triumphant run, Ogier talked to rivals.

But he and Wilson and surely couldn't have dared expect things to turn out so well so soon. He'd had the time for hardly any testing inn the new Fiesta before the Monte began.

Ogier's win involved a stack of luck. He couldn't fathom what the car was doing on the early stages and went off at least twice – slithered into a ditch on day one and later bounced across a field. But he was able to keep going each time. He had to make big alterations to the car's setup in early services.

This makes it four Monte wins on the trot for this four-time world champion. To a degree champions make their own luck.

Hyundai were the only works WRC team continuing from last year. But they too had to cope with the new rules, and the lottery of choosing tyres and a chassis set-up to suit the melee of conditions through each stage.

Still, Thierry Neuville set off in smooth quick style and held the lead to almost the end of the third day. He'd set five fastest stage times by that point. Then he ran wide in a slow corner, hit a concrete barrier and damaged the suspension, losing 30 minutes while they repaired it at the side of the road in the stage.

Citroen fielded two C3 WRCs for Kris Meeke and Stephane Lefebvre, plus last year's DS3 for Craig Breen. The C3 has been under development since late 2015. The car was basically built around Meeke. A trained engineer, he was central to the effort from the start.

The team was adamant this season – even this rally – wasn't just a learning curve. They wanted to win ASAP. Didn't turn out quite that way.

Meeke's rally could hardly have been less straightforward. On day two he hit ice that looked like grippier snow and crashed out. Out of contention for the final standings, he carried on in the repaired car (you can do that under something called the Rally2 rules) and set some decent times, until engine trouble forced him out again on day three.

That fixed, he then got hit by another non-rally car on the open road transport section back to Monaco, ruling him out of the final leg and the possibility of Power Stage bonus points.

This isn't a supermini that's mating with a grossly engorged industrial vacuum cleaner. It's a Toyota Yaris. See what the new rules can do for a car?

Maximum width of a car has gone up by 55mm. So blistered wheel-arches have given way to spectacular flat-topped extensions, a key part of the aerodynamics. The suspension gets more travel, as well as extra grip from the wider track. A controlled centre diff, used in past years but then banned, is back, giving much better control of oversteer-understeer balance. There are mechanical LSDs at both ends.

Oh and then the aero. It's designed for downforce at both ends, plus ejection of gravel and snow underneath. You don't need us to tell you how spectacular the whole confection looks.

The new cars eject themselves out of corners visibly and audibly faster than the old. The engines' intake restrictor is up from 33mm to 36mm. That brings a power increase to about 380bhp, but there's a boost pressure limit of 2.5 bar so torque stays somewhere just under 300lb ft.

Weight is regulated at 1190kg, or 1350kg with crew.

It's no coincidence the four teams at the sharp end of WRC this year are all based on mass-market cars. This is an accessible sport for fans.

Top Gear asked PSA Group boss about why Citroen is in rallying whereas DS does Formula E and Peugeot won the Dakar. "Citroen is our people-minded brand," he says. "Rallying is the sport closest to the people." 

We ask Citroen's CEO Linda Jackson why she decided to re-enter WRC. "Rallying is the number two motorsport globally for popularity. It's in line with Citroen's position, as it's not an elitist sport. Rallying shows we can do endurance and quality. That has a link with road cars. And we're launching the new C3 so it made absolute sense to rally it."

Jackson isn't a crazed sport enthusiast, so she made the decision for pragmatic reasons. "These days you can measure the coverage, and the online activity. You can't directly measure sales as a consequence, but yes you can put a value on the coverage."

"We have a bit of history in this," she added. Indeed. Before VW dominated, Seb Loeb was champion in Citroens nine times on the trot up to 2012.

And the cost? Tavares says a WRC team is about a tenth of the price of a season in F1. By the way he says the hyper-technological WEC is also as pricey as F1, a state of affairs he calls 'crazy'. Hence Peugeot isn't at Le Mans. He says about half the cost of a WRC season is developing the car, and half is actually going to the rallies.

Toyota's new team is run by four-time world champion Tommi Mäkinen. He told Top Gear he has of course had a go in the car to help with testing. The drivers had tried mega sideways tactics in the new cars in testing, but soon reverted back to "a neutral cornering [attitude] with a little bit of understeer because this is the fastest way." There's a glimmer of glumness in his voice at the admission. Any rally fan would agree.

Yet here's Jari-Matti Latvala giving it some slither, as he did several times in Top Gear's sight. Mäkinen says Latvala (unlike team-make Hänninen) is smooth and gentle on his tyres and brakes. That could matter a lot in long tarmac stages, because these 2017 cars stress the rubber and pads so much more.

Latvala eventually finished second, a result ahead of his team's expectations. They'd been verbally soft-pedalling at the start, Mäkinen talking being "here to learn lessons so we are competitive in 2018."

It was nearly an M-Sport Fiesta one-two. Ott Tänak was quick, getting fastest time on stage 3, and not a little spectacular every time he passed us.

But a misfire near the end cost him a time during the stages, and a penalty for a frantic bonnet-up delay as he and his co-driver tried to fix things between them. He ended up third overall.

Here's Dani Sordo in the other Hyundai i20 Coupe. He stopped with power steering troubles in the very same stage as his team mate rally-leading Neuville. But he still finished fourth overall. 

The rally had started in the worst possible way when Haydon Paddon hit black ice and rolled his Hyundai. A spectator died in the crash and Hyundai withdrew the car.

Craig Breen did amazingly well in last year's DS3. Mind you it was clear, especially in the early stages of the rally, that these cars were a more straightforward drive. You'd see a 2017 car go by, its driver sawing at the wheel. Then Breen, or Mikkelson in the Skoda R5, would glide by like a swan. But in dry tarmac, they just couldn't fire themselves down the road like their adversaries in the full-on 380bhp cars.

Elfyn Evans came home 6th, having also set three fastest times. His was M-Sport's third car, running on DMACK tyres rather than his team-mates' Michelins. Dunno if this is related, but his style was always more crowd-pleasingly sideways.

Here's Andreas Mikkelsen. Remarkable job he did. Having won the final WRC round in 2016, he found himself without a drive once Ogier signed for M-Sport. So he's a class down, in the Skoda Fabia R5. Skoda entered three of them, in the blue and white stripes of the rear-engined Skoda 130S that won the under-1300cc class in the Monte Carlo 40 years ago. They were smooth and controlled and did huge justice to their equipment. Mikkelsen came seventh overall, team-mate Kopecky 8th.

Lefebvre brought the first Citroen C3 home, in 9th overall. He can console himself and the team that he was quickest on stage 15, the infamous snowy hairpin staircase to the mile-high (yup 1,607m) top of the Col de Turini.

Definite chief of the grandstanders further down the field was Massé in a DS3. He handbraked it every time we saw him, throwing shapes like an Escort Mexico. The crowd duly went wild.

The Toyotas might have anti-lag like fireworks night, but even so Top Gear's Noise of the Rally award goes to Romain Dumas's 911. Especially where there was no snow to muffle the treble, this thing sounded gorgeous as the SFX bounced around the rocks. Dumas drove it tidily too.

More rear-drive action from three Abarth 124s. Two of them ran in the top 20 overall during day two, heading the R.GT class, for European rounds only. Old hand Francois Delecour was in one. He won the 1994 Monte in an Escort Cosworth. More sideways though please, Francois.

Tyre choice is one of the critical balls in the Monte lottery. A driver has to pick between four kinds: soft and supersoft for dry tarmac, a snow tyre and a studded tyre for ice. Each car can't use more than 41 during the 240 stage miles and 641 transport miles between. But they need to do several stages, at different altitudes, between changes. That's OK if it's dry tarmac throughout, or indeed consistent snow. But the mix this year, said to be the craziest for 20 years, threw curveballs in every direction.

Rallying really is the sport of the people. Families who never watch any other motorsport climb up the hill from their alpine villages and set up cheese and wine picnics by open fires. And in Gap, the locals get to see the service action - you can stand right by the cars, unlike the obsessively secretive and hygienic distance of an F1 pit. It's fair to say some of the teams had a bit of headscratching during the event. There'll be more development to come, not to mention events where tyre choice isn't so fickle, before we really know who'll dominate the season. 

Good for Ogier so far, but even he says it's likely to be the closest for ages. "It's hard to see any dominance. I hope we're all there with similar performance. That's good for the sport." But the steely-cored Frenchman clearly has a deep need to be at the front of that close pack.