A few days ago Chris Atkinson got his first impressions of the Citroen C4 WRC at a test in northern France, getting to grips with the car in wet, dry as well as frozen conditions – and even in darkness. The test covered 180 km’s intended as a warm-up before rally Ireland, the only rally the Australian is confirmed to drive in the Citroen Junior team. However, as I’ve previously told, Atkinson will probably do more rallies in the C4. Speculations talk about 9 rallies this season in the team, while I personally have believed that Atkinson will manage to seal a full season in the Citroen. Now that seems impossible as Atkinson is not entered in Rally Norway, but I continue to believe that he will do the rest of the rallies this season – now besides Norway.
In this video you can see an interview, the test with and even Atkinson taking notes for the test:
Atkinson himself, who has previously spent all his WRC career in a Subaru, was really impressed by the Citroen. We’ve heard it before regarding both the C4 and the Xsara, that you can attack hard into turns and still have very good control and balance of the car – facts that Atkinson immediately agreed on and told the journalists.
Looking forward to Ireland, Atkinson is probably happy to have done a full day of testing on roads that he thought were representative of the roads back in Ireland. The last time he went out of a rally car before that was in Wales, were he crashed badly and was transfered by helicopter to hospital – luckily unhurt though. Anyway, it must have been a psychological relief for him to manage to do some good testing between the accident and the rally – especially considering what happened with Subaru and that he’s now getting into a totally new car for him. After all the years struggling in problematic Subaru, it will also be really, really interesting to all of us to see how Atkinson can perform in Citroen.
Finally, just as a parenthesis, I think it seems more and more obvious that Atkinson is not planning to do just one rally in Citroen. Considering the fact that he’s launching a new website soon, he has started a Citroen branded YouTube user, he promotes the Australian Citroen dealer in his YouTube movie and other things – it seems unlikely he would do everything just because of a one-time rally. If he’s not doing a full season (except Norway) in the C4 – I at least expect that all rallies he manages to start in this season will be in the Citroen.
