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The Junior World Rally Championship opener in Sweden last weekend could have been cancelled but for an overnight effort by M-Sport Poland to rectify a technical problem.
M-Sport Poland, which prepares the cars for the full JWRC field, discovered an electrical glitch on the Ford Fiesta R2 after competition cars had already departed for Torsby and Rally Sweden.
Junior WRC team director Maciek Woda admitted he had feared the worst for the opening round.
“The problem came with a software change in the body control module,” Woda told Autosport.
“Obviously our cars are based on the road car which comes with so many sensors and actuators that we don’t need, so we strip some of them out.
“The problem came with our second batch of cars which were manufactured after August last year – which was when the software change came.
“The first batch, which included the test cars we’d done thousands of kilometres of running with, were manufactured in July so we ran those cars with no problem at all.”
Had it not been rectified, the issue would have affected various electrical components in the cars, including power steering, lights and windscreen wipers.
“We tried to fix the problem through Thursday, but in the end, we flew to Ford in Cologne first thing Friday morning and took all the parts with us,” Woda explained.
“We landed back in Krakow at midnight on Friday and went directly to our factory to fit the parts. But still, they didn’t work. That night, I did not sleep.”
Woda heaped praise on Ford Performance in the UK and their colleagues in Cologne for the effort in fixing the problem.
“They were fantastic,” he said. “We couldn’t be here without them. Basically, because we were quite tired, we’d made a small mistake in fitting the parts in the early hours of Saturday morning.
“After talking to Cologne, we realised this – refitted them and we haven’t had a problem since.
“Honestly, this was the scariest moment of my career. I kept thinking: ‘How can I have put myself – and the company – in this position when we could not start the rally?’
“In the end, it all worked and we had all 13 cars running on every day of a very difficult rally. That’s an achievement of which I am really, really proud.
“You know the tight timeframe we were up against anyway, but then when we have this late issue as well, what M-Sport Poland has done is fantastic.
“The success of this opening round of the JWRC comes from us, but it also comes from Ford – we can’t thank them enough for the excellent support and cooperation.”