Getting a grip

After a season-opening Monte Carlo Rally that was somewhat lacking in snow – in fact, it was basically an asphalt rally with a few small patches of ice – there will be plenty of the white stuff on round two of the World Rally Championship: Rally Sweden.

In order to guarantee that, the event moved north to Umea a couple of years ago: just 400 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. As a result, there should be suitably polar temperatures below minus 10 degrees centigrade throughout the event. This tends to be a bigger challenge for the frozen mechanics in the service park than the drivers themselves, who have all sorts of devices – including battery-heated socks if required – to keep themselves warm.

Sweden is in fact the only rally of the championship that is entirely run on snow and ice, so the drivers use studded Sottozero snow tyres to stay on the road, equipped with 384 seven-millimetre tungsten-tipped studs, which bite into the road surface and gain traction, a bit like crampons for the road. The effect is quite surreal: cars are then able to drive flat-out on surfaces that a person might struggle to stand up on.

Having those precious studs is one thing: keeping them in the tyre is another thing entirely. However, Pirelli has a patented process that locks the studs in place during the vulcanisation – or ‘cooking' – phase, ensuring that they don't get ripped out by the friction against the surface, which is a common problem with other tyres.

This technology is also transferred to some winter tyres for the road, which are also available with studs in selected countries – like parts of Canada, Russia, and of course Scandinavia – that are affected by extreme weather in winter.

As well as the right tyres, these very specialised conditions also require the right driver. Driving a rally car on snow is a question of feeling the delicate combination of grip and balance, with the drivers also using the high snow banks by the side of the road to guide the cars round the corners. It's where rallying meets bobsleigh, but you have to get that balance exactly right: lean too hard against the snow bank and the car will simply go crashing through it and end up stuck.

That feeling for snow is so elusive that up until Sebastien Loeb in 2004, no non-Nordic driver had ever won the event. But the locals still have something of an advantage: the record for the most wins (seven) remains the property of Swedish legend Stig Blomqvist.

The pre-rally favourite this year is probably Finland's Kalle Rovanpera, the fastest driver on the recent Arctic Rally, which Toyota used to prepare for Rally Sweden.

Having skipped the season-opening Rallye Monte-Carlo, the reigning world champion also has the significant advantage of starting lower down the road order, which means that he will benefit from driving on clean stages that have been swept clear of loose snow.

However, it's far from a foregone conclusion: last year's winner was Ott Tanak – at the wheel of a Ford Puma. Current championship leader Thierry Neuville, who won in Monte-Carlo last month, is the most consistent driver on Rally Sweden in recent years, having been on the podium four times in the last five years (including one win). He, however, will have the dubious honour of running first on the road and acting as a handy snowplough for those behind him.

Rovanpera won't be the only driver in Sweden making his 2024 WRC debut with a Toyota. Italian privateer Lorenzo Bertelli has a Rally 1 Yaris WRC at his disposal, in factory colours for the first time – making it nine cars in the top category. The Italian, the heir to the Prada empire, could do any rally he likes in the rare moments he has off – but the fact that he nearly always chooses Sweden for a one-off outing tells you just how much fun it is for every driver.

The battle in Rally 2 is even tighter, with the top stars including Oliver Solberg: son of 2003 World Rally Champion Petter Solberg. Five manufacturers are represented in Rally 2, underlining the closeness of the competition as seen on Rallye Monte-Carlo.

But perhaps the most hard-fought race of all will be among the Junior WRC drivers – who have everything to prove and the huge prize of a WRC2 drive at stake. Using identical Ford Fiesta Rally 3 cars (which are four-wheel drive but cost a maximum of €100,000 Euros to keep budgets accessible) there is a record entry of 19 crews this year, 13 of whom are newcomers. One of them is Fabio Schwarz, the 18-year-old son of former WRC star Armin Schwarz from Germany.

One thing that people will notice immediately on Rally Sweden is the fact that the Hyundai factory cars now look very different.

Normally, the first round of the season is when a fresh colour scheme comes out, but the Alzenau team has decided to leave it until round two. The new look gives much more visibility to Hyundai's performance N brand, which is a huge success story built directly out of rallying – not dissimilar to what Subaru did several years ago.

These N-branded road cars owe a lot to the WRC campaign, with Hyundai using the lessons learned from the world's stages to shape the award-winning dynamics of the road cars. And that even comes down to the tyres. You'll find bespoke P Zero road tyres on the i30N, developed exclusively for the road-going equivalent of the rally car (which completed more than 10,000 kilometres of testing at the famed Nurburgring).

The challenge on the slippery stages around Umea is somewhat different to the ‘Green Hell' or even the motorway, but it serves as a reminder of the relevance of motorsport – especially rallying – to everyday driving. These are real cars, which people drive every day, on real roads: a genuine intersection between road and track.