Kris Meeke has criticised the Citroen World Rally Championship team’s decision not to test locally before this week’s Rally GB.
Winner of the previous WRC round, Meeke fears his chances of success on his home rally have been hit by struggling to find the most appropriate set-up for his C3 WRC on Thursday’s shakedown stage.
The Citroen squad completed its pre-event test in the forests of south-west France, where the roads and the terrain are similar to Wales but the surface is not identical.
Dry weather made the test more tricky for Meeke, and further compromised the team’s efforts to simulate the wet and muddy conditions expected this week.
Meeke was a lowly 12th fastest through the two-mile Clocaenog test on Thursday morning, 4.7 seconds off the pacesetting Elfyn Evans.
“When you don’t prepare so well, it’s not so easy,” said Northern Irishman Meeke.
“We’ve plucked a set-up from the air and arrived at it, but what can we do?”
Meeke added the decision not to run the remote shakedown service closer to the stage in Ruthin also cost him valuable time.
“We tried to make some set-up changes at shakedown,” he added, “but we had to come all the way back to service [in Deeside] and by the time we got back up to the stage, the road was polished.
“It felt like ice in there.
“It’s tricky to look at a bit of paper [with the set-up details] and then go and do what we’re doing.
“When you don’t prepare correctly, that’s what happens.”
Citroen’s team principal Yves Matton explained the decision not to test in Wales was born out of the cost of hiring forest roads in the UK.