Paris (AFP)

After Ogier, the flood? While the 2020 season, which begins this week with the Monte-Carlo, should be the last of the six-time world rally champion, for the French generation, places are expensive in the WRC.

This year as in 2019, two tricolors run all or part of the championship as official drivers in the queen category: Sébastien Loeb (45, champion from 2004 to 2012), who must compete six rounds out of thirteen with Hyundai, and Sébastien Ogier (36, sacred from 2013 to 2018), spent at Toyota.

In their wake, the candidates (Pierre-Louis Loubet, Adrien Fourmaux, Yohan Rossel, Jean-Baptiste and Mathieu Franceschi or Nicolas Ciamin) are numerous, thanks in particular to the detection and support program of the French Federation of Motor Sports ( FFSA), but a good drive does not guarantee reaching the last rung.

"It's complicated because there are only three manufacturers (Hyundai, Toyota and M-Sport Ford, editor's note) and we are a lot of contenders", sums up Adrien Fourmaux, 24, interviewed by AFP .

At the end of 2019, Citroën, which launched the careers of the two Sébastiens, suddenly withdrew following Ogier's decision to try to reclaim the world title ceded to the Estonian Ott Tänak elsewhere. So these are two fewer cars that race in 2020 and a very suitable door that closes for the tricolors, even though the plateau has never been so raised.

- "Few chosen" -

"There are very few chosen to arrive in WRC so I had to win," adds Corsica Pierre-Louis Loubet, titled in WRC2, the lower category, last year. "It allows me to see a little more coming," said the 22-year-old whose program has not yet been announced but who hopes to compete in several races in the WRC.

"From the moment you do not win, you have the impression that it is a mountain because there are so many good young people who dream of accessing it that it is not necessarily every year that there is a new driver ", confides the son of Yves Loubet, European rally champion in 1989.

In 2020, only one "rookie", the 19-year-old Finn Kalle Rovanperä, is offered a full season, when several headliners, including his compatriot Jari-Matti Latvala, vice-champion in 2010, 2014 and 2015, end up on the floor.

It must be said that the son of former driver Harri Rovanperä has accumulated the good points. To start with that of being from the homeland of the rally, which produced six world champions sharing thirteen titles (only France did better with sixteen crowns, including fifteen for Loeb and Ogier only) and which is the best represented with three incumbents at the highest level this season. His place was found at Toyota, the team of his compatriot Tommi Mäkinen.

- "Find the best vein" -

In this ultra-competitive universe, "we have no choice: we have to be better than the others and not behind the wheel", continues Fourmaux, who made his World debut in 2019, scoring a point thanks to his tenth place in Monte-Carlo.

"We have to find the best vein, find someone who follows us as much as possible and who brings us up", details the resident of the French team FFSA Rallye (alongside Loubet and the champion of France Yohan Rossel, 24 years, engaged in WRC3 at the wheel of a Citroën C3).

It is M-Sport which offers him his first full season in WRC2 this year, before perhaps being promoted in his ranks to the queen category.

Those who succeed will have to take up a new, tough challenge: staying permanently in the WRC, unlike Stéphane Lefebvre, demoted in 2018 after an inconclusive passage within the elite at Citroën.

© 2020 AFP