Guy Wilks, your time is now. This week’s Rally Argentina is the perfect opportunity for the double British champion to get one over on his arch-rival and countryman Kris Meeke. In fact, it’s more than the perfect opportunity, it’s almost a prerequisite if he’s going to pose a genuine threat to the reigning IRC champion.
On the last three rounds of the IRC, Wilks and Meeke have gone head-to-head, with the Peugeot driver coming out on top, in terms of pace, one each occasion. Granted, the record will show that Wilks won Rally of Scotland, after Meeke’s 207 was excluded for running an underweight sub-frame. There was more misery for Meeke in Monte, but when he ditched the Peugeot after dropping it on a patch of ice, he was comfortably ahead of Wilks. And then there was Curitiba, where nobody could really hold a candle to the Northern Irishman.
That brings us to Argentina. Just as Meeke had the upper hand in terms of experience last time out in Brazil, so Wilks does in Argentina: the Skoda man has won this event when it was a round of the Junior World Rally Championship. Meeke’s familiarity with the Cordoba roads only stretches as far as a recce.
The career paths of these two drivers have remained obstinately linked; they arrived in the British Rally Championship together and then made the move up to the J-WRC at the same time. Having both failed to win the Junior award, their careers even appeared to have stalled simultaneously. And now, here they are in similarly matched machinery ready to ready to race again.
And while Meeke proved himself by winning last year’s IRC title in a sublime display of consistent pace, the global jury could, arguably, still be out on Wilks.
There’s no doubt he’s a fast driver, but the time has come for him to deliver on the bigger stage. The time has come for him to step outside of the shadow Meeke has cast over him.
Certainly, this year’s not all about Wilks beating Meeke; there are other strong drivers in the IRC in the shape of Nasser Al Attiyah, Juho Hanninen and Jan Kopecky, but whether he likes it or not, Meeke has become his yardstick.
Wilks contested a selected programme of IRC rounds in Proton’s Satria Neo S2000 and, for whatever reason, failed to shine. Now he’s in a well proven car on a rally he has tasted victory on before. Wilks can be as puritanical as he wants about his championship aspirations, but this sport of ours is about driving cars faster than anybody else.
And that’s all any of us are really interested in.
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