How hard is it to become a World Rally mechanic?

“You look legit. You look like a mechanic.” Perhaps Hayden Paddon, Hyundai’s charismatic Kiwi rally driver, is just trying to be nice. Or perhaps he’s complimenting me in an effort to convince himself that having a spanner spannering on his car is OK. But when bits of me ache that I didn’t even know contained muscle, I feel far from legit partway through my week as a mechanic on Hyundai’s world rally team…

Images: Lee Brimble

This feature originally appeared in the April 2017 edition of Top Gear magazine. 

Things start well enough. It’s Rally Sweden, the coldest round of the World Rally Championship. Temperatures in the -20s aren’t uncommon, and at no point this week will the trusty smartphone weather app show positive figures. But while even Citroen appears to have brought a tent to work on its C3s, Hyundai has a building for its i20 Coupes.  

A building larger than the complex containing my flat, and one which, as soon as the automatic door shuts behind me, is toastier than my home ever feels. Fears of being sprawled cluelessly under a car while my fingers turn blue can be allayed for now.

But it’s not going to be easy. Ernst Kopp is the workshop manager and my mentor for the next few days, the wonderfully patient man (I hope) who will be making sure I don’t bolt a damper in upside down or stick a light pod on backwards. Because, with my embarrassingly absent mechanical skills, those feel like very real possibilities.

“A race mechanic has to be flexible,” he tells me, “they have to do everything. Everyone is trained to do everything – no one specialises like in Formula One.” Hyundai brings a ginormous team of people to rallies – 84 are in Sweden – but each of its three WRC cars essentially has four mechanics, one for each corner of the car.

And when Ernst says they need to be able to do everything, he means it; while you almost certainly take your own car to different people if it needs its gearbox or windscreen replacing, this lot need to be able to do both in quick succession, without flicking through a Haynes manual or rehearsing the process beforehand. 

Once I’ve been given slightly baggy Hyundai overalls to wear – making me feel like a work experience teenager drowning in his dad’s shirt and tie – Ernst throws me straight into the team of mechanics working around Spaniard Dani Sordo’s car. Sensing my inexperience, my first task is to tighten up a couple of screws on the front splitter. It feels one rung above being sent to ask for a long stand.

And yet I’m struggling. The splitter needs manhandling into place, while the screws themselves need to be pushed and twisted simultaneously, a bit like the lid on a bottle of bleach. I must work all of my limbs at once, which is a far bigger ask than it ought to be. Jesus, if I can’t do this…

After several concerned looks from Ernst and Dani’s mechanics, I get the job done, in presumably record time. The wrong kind of record.

But this is the sort of tardiness that would be ironed out in training: if you want to spanner for Hyundai, your probation takes place in its test team, the guys who develop the car during the season, but outside of rallies. It allows you to work on mechanicals when time isn’t quite of the essence, but you’ll do timed challenges, much like F1 teams practise pit stops against the clock.

I’m also working on the car in the days before Rally Sweden begins. If this was a ‘service’ during the rally – there are several each day, with strictly scrutineered 15-, 30- or 45-minute time limits – I presume I’d have long been marched out of the cosily warm building, without time to get my coat.

Day two begins with the revelation Dani Sordo’s splitter remains attached. It also begins with a gaggle of scrutineers snooping around the Hyundai garage, possessing branded bobble hats and clipboards, but seemingly little in the way of a sense of humour. So I skulk away into one of the Hyundai lorries and help one of Hayden’s mechanics – a chap named Csaba Juhász – make some mudflaps.

Alright, it’s not what most race mechanics aspire to do. But with the proper items having not turned up yet, some replacements need drafting in, so Csaba rolls out a sheet of rubber and with a paper template, a scalpel and a hammer, we make three sets of four mudflaps together. It’s all gone frighteningly well, and my teacher is extremely patient, even when I shower the pair of us in rubber shavings as I cack-handedly smooth the flaps’ edges with a sander.

My feeling of pride as I screw ‘my’ mudflaps into some actual world rally cars is greater than it really should be. I even take a picture and send it to some rally-loving mates (who, you’ll be relieved to know, instantly take the mickey).

There’s no time to rest on undeserved laurels, though, as there’s a lot to be done on the cars ahead of Sweden’s first stage. Not least vacuuming up the mess I’ve made with that sander. The afternoon is packed; I’m on my knees helping replace dampers – at €4,500 per corner, not a job I’ve been looking forward to – and prickling my hands changing studded tyres. 

The day ends with us fitting big rows of spotlights to the cars, with Sweden’s first stage run as a night-time ‘super special’ in front of a stadium crowd. The last time I changed the lightbulb on a car, it was on my 1994 Renault Clio. And I somehow made it into a two-and-a-half-hour process.

Not only does a WRC car have a far more speed-oriented layout than an old French hatchback, but there’s a team of very friendly blokes helping, and we get the job done just in time for the media to swoop into the Hyundai apartment block for driver interviews. Which is when, overalls tied around my waist and mudflap shavings still in my eyebrows, Hayden tells me I look “legit”. Whether he means it or not, I’m knackered and in mild pain. I’m having it as a compliment. 

When the rally begins on day three, though, I’m not legit enough to work on the car. Hyundai are saved a polite but brutal assessment of my talents by some FIA rules: each competing car gets four armbands, and only those wearing an armband can work on the car once stage one starts.

They’re hardly going to elbow a mechanic from his respective corner, but nor would I want them to. Watching these boys really in action, when they’re up against the clock and fixing things that have broken or worn during a stage, is properly bewitching.

They scrape ice out of the wheelarches and sweep it from the floor with the same dizzying enthusiasm they display while changing a gearbox. And it’s like one machine with four outlets; they work quickly but without panic around the cars, throwing things between each other while barely saying a word or glancing up to check what the others are doing. “You can reach instinctive level with some people in one rally, but with others it takes a couple of rallies,” says Csaba. 

“When we do something we do it without using so many words,” adds Bartosz Tuszakowski, another of Hayden’s mechanics. “You have to trust your partner on the axle. Sometimes you have to work on a fix together so you need to know exactly what to do. You’re waiting for the moment the car comes back to service all day, and when it does you are full of adrenaline. And here, when you’re working under the car and the ice and snow is dropping on your face, it’s not very nice.”

Indeed, for all the glitz of Hyundai’s paddock set-up, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of glamour to what goes on inside it. Days start early and can finish very, very late for a mechanic, with precious little time for rest while the cars are out on the stages.

It’s a time to prepare parts for the next service and make sure the area is nice and clean for when the car arrives, while keeping an eye on the timing screens. One mechanic compares the sleep-deprivation to a heavy weekend drinking with mates, minus the alcohol. And with a week away from home for each rally and lots of testing in-between, they see very little of family and friends.

With all of them trained mechanics, why do they choose to do it here, then? “You cannot only do this job for money,” admits Bartosz. “But as a young boy you go to see rallies and you start to think ‘I would like to wash the screen for the drivers’, then you move on to change some wheels, and you keep wanting to work on more, and go higher and higher.”

“If it was only about me I would stay in this job forever,” says Martin Kasík, one of Dani’s mechanics. “But my family aren’t always happy with how much I am away. It is still like a hobby. I’ve loved rallying since I was small – my father also loved it. So it’s brilliant to work on it from the other side.”

It’s a quote made all the more endearing when stage eight of the rally skirts by the edge of Torsby airport, where the service area is rooted. With a small amount of time before the cars return for their evening service, every single mechanic piles onto an upstairs balcony for their one chance at a distant peek of the action. They cheer as the recognisable sound of the i20s signifies their drivers passing, and indulge in innocent jeering when rival cars pass, before running to see the timing screens. 

For evidence of their passion for the job, and how their team spirit transcends evident language barriers, it’s perfect. I may not be legit, but these boys definitely are.