Driving with Sebastien Loeb is a roller coaster of a scary, fantastic journey, writes Ben Oliver
HAVE I JUST died? Did we just crash? A split-second ago I was strapped into the passenger seat of a rally car, tearing down a narrow, rutted French goat-track at motorway speed; engine screaming, stones bulleting into the bodywork, trees and hedgerows a green blur by my window. But now it's all gone oddly calm; all I can see through the windscreen is blue sky and I feel like I'm floating. Did we screw up? Did we barrel-roll into one of those trees at 200km/h? Have the heavenly hosts already arrived to carry us aloft?
No. The quadruple - and reigning - world rally champion Sebastien Loeb does not screw up, particularly when he's carrying a terrified journalist instead of his usual co-driver. But we are heading skywards; Loeb has casually put his Citroën C4 WRC car six feet in the air and flies it 50 feet beyond the crest that launched us.
When we land, the weight of my head and the helmet I'm wearing seems to quadruple and compresses my neck with sickening force. It doesn't seem to bother Loeb, though; his right foot is flat on the floor again, the din and the blurred scenery are back and we're fast-forwarding to the next obstacle at the same impossible pace.
For talent and bravery, rally drivers leave the Formula One prima-donnas choking on their dust. F1 drivers only have to memorise a dozen or so corners at each circuit, get to drive on perfect tarmac and have huge run-off areas if it goes wrong.
Rally drivers have to fling themselves through forests and over mountains on roads they might only have seen once before, the car constantly sliding on ice or mud or gravel, with only the shouted instructions of their co-driver for guidance and a fatal crash always inches away. Little wonder rallying has such a cult following, and collects more fans when F1 gets predictable.
So if rally drivers are the best in motorsport, and Loeb the best rally driver, does that mean we're sitting next to the world's best driver?
From the passenger seat, I'd say yes. The 34-year-old French former electrician came late to motorsport. Unlike Lewis Hamilton, who was racing when he was still in nappies, Loeb did his first full season of rallying just 10 years ago and only joined the top flight in 2002.
But the next year he missed out on the world championship by only one point; he took it in 2004 and 2005, and in 2006 won so comfortably that he was able to break his arm mountain biking, miss the last two rallies and still retain his title. He won again in 2007, meaning he ties legends Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Makinen with four WRC crowns apiece. But Loeb is certain to win more.
He has also twice won the Race of Champions, which pits the best drivers from every form of motorsport against each other in all kinds of cars in a season's-end spectacular. He even managed second place in the world's toughest circuit race, the Le Mans 24 hours, in his summer holiday in 2006.
Last year he spent his break in Ireland: not golfing or fishing, but driving in the Donegal International Rally in June as he prepared for last year's inaugural Rally Ireland. Imagine Tiger Woods arriving for a round at your local golf course.
Loeb aced it, unsurprisingly, and his groundwork netted him a 53-second win over team-mate Dani Sordo in the main event last November.
You can't clamber into the cockpit with Lewis Hamilton, but today Loeb's regular co-driver Daniel Elena has been displaced and The Irish Timeshas been granted the extraordinary privilege of observing a world champion at close quarters and full speed.
We're in a full World Rally car in exactly the same state of tune as it would be in competition.
And Loeb isn't easing off for my benefit; he has already ripped one back bumper off today, and before we can go out his pit crew have to stitch up the damage he's just done to the only spare.
"If this was a stage in a world rally, I probably wouldn't know it so well, so I wouldn't be as quick," he says before we go. "But now I've driven this stage a few times, so I know how hard I can push. You're going to see the real thing."
Ever been on a really fast roller coaster? Even that doesn't compare with what follows. You get the same absurd speed, the same intense g-forces as the car slides through corners, sinks into bomb-holes or leaps over crests. And you have the same intense desire for your harness to stay attached.
But on a roller coaster you know that there are banks of computers and thousands of tonnes of steel ensuring that nothing will go wrong. Here it's only Loeb's incandescent talent keeping you out of the scenery, and this track is designed to let him show off the entire repertoire of driving skills that mortals like us will never master. On tight bends he tugs the huge, high-set handbrake to slide the back end around.
On faster bends, he actually turns away from the corner first, letting the car start to spin back in the opposite direction and catching it when the nose points perfectly at the apex. Through the bends he uses the brake and the accelerator at the same time to throw more weight over the front end for grip, and on the exit he holds the car in a long, spectacular sideways drift, using opposite lock to steer into the direction of the slide and looking out of his side window instead of his windscreen.
Loeb has the hand-speed of a boxer, the footwork of a ballerina and the aerobatic abilities of a pilot. Little wonder that he was leading this year's World Rally Championship too, until a freak head-on collision with a privately-entered Citroën between stages on the Rally of Jordan cost him his lead, and ultimately the win.
That went to Finn Mikko Hirvonen in the Ford Focus WRC, reversing the five-point lead Loeb held over him going into the rally.
Fortunately no-one was injured, and it will prove a minor - if bizarre - setback in the career of a driver who threatens to dominate his branch of motorsport as comprehensively as Michael Schumacher did his. The details of Loeb's multi-million euro deal with Citroën are secret, but whatever they pay him, he's worth it.