There’s an air of sad inevitability about Citroën’s decision to drop Kris Meeke from its World Rally Championship team, but that doesn’t lessen the disappointment of the French manufacturer’s rather abrupt mid-season bombshell.

Mind you, some people viewing the chilling images of Meeke's crumpled Citroen C3 WRC from last weekend’s Rally Portugal might consider Citroën’s decision as the most sensible option it could take.

The safety cell of the Citroën stood up well to the high-speed trip into the scenery, but Meeke and co-driver Paul Nagle were nonetheless extremely lucky to escape. Coming as it did after several other incidents during his time with the team, it seems patience has finally run out.

Meeke’s prodigious raw speed in a rally car has never been in question. Neither has his bravery or application. His consistency, however, has been sorely lacking for a team leader. As an enthusiastic supporter of British rally drivers, I kept waiting for the breakthrough; that moment when he strung together three or four podium finishes in a row and emerged as a title contender.

It never came. An impressive result was usually followed on the next event by a momentum-crushing mishap or a technical failure. Meeke’s strongest season came in 2015, when he finished fifth in the standings after a positive run during the last four events. He’s been up and down ever since he signed his dream full-time deal with Citroën and the weight of expectation upon him has increased.

Can all the blame be laid at Meeke’s door, though? In recent years Citroën’s rally assault – as a privateer team and then latterly as a factory entrant – has comprehensively failed to match the success enjoyed during the era when Sébastien Loeb led the team. Even now, a year and a bit into its life, the C3 WRC looks a handful compared to its rivals from M-Sport/Ford, Hyundai and Toyota.

Riding with Sebastien Loeb at the Festival of Speed

It makes me wonder whether the team environment wasn’t right to bring out the best in a driver of Meeke’s temperament. To be fair, he’s probably not the man to have in your car if you want to rack up insipid fifth or sixth-placed finishes in every event. He’s experienced some torrid luck – such as engine failure when he was leading in France last year – but has to shoulder the responsibility for failing to bring the car home on several events.

Meeke’s no-prisoners driving style is perhaps not surprising. His mentor was Colin McRae, who of course had a reputation as something of a wild driver in his early career but managed to curb his excesses when he linked up with Subaru and Prodrive. David Richards and his rally team knew they would end up with some bent and broken Legacys and Imprezas, but also appreciated that the accidents would become less frequent as McRae matured.

McRae developed into a driver who was able to stay on the right side of the line between flat-out and failure more often than not, and the 1995 world championship was the result.

In pictures: Colin McRae's career highlights

What’s strange about Citroën’s timing with this decision can be found in a post by Meeke on Facebook published just minutes before Citroen released the statement announcing his sacking. Meeke hinted that the team might have made a breakthrough with the set-up problems it has experienced with the C3 WRC. He wrote that the car’s handling on the gravel stages in Portugal was “excellent - the best I’ve had since we brought the car into competition at the start of 2017”. 

This isn’t the first time Meeke has experienced adversity in his WRC career. He was treated poorly by the Mini/Prodrive team that appeared to have handed him a golden opportunity in 2011 but then dropped him as the project foundered less than a year later. He bounced back from that disappointment and secured the Citroën drive relatively late in his career, almost at the moment he’d given up hope of the chance ever presenting itself.

What he does next is less clear. Citroën’s statement doesn’t specify whether he’s been ousted from the team set-up entirely and is therefore a free agent or has merely been dropped from the driving roster. His skills as a development driver helped attract the French company’s attention in the first place and his wealth of contemporary experience would be invaluable behind the scenes at any of Citroën’s rivals.

If Portugal was the final time we see Meeke on a World Rally Championship event, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that he has five top-level rally wins to his name. Of the British drivers to compete in the WRC, only McRae and Richard Burns have more.

One of his wins came on the flat-out forest tracks of Finland in 2016. It is one of the most specialised rallies on the calendar, and only the bravest and most skilled drivers have ever cracked the dominance of the local drivers for as long as it has been a world championship event.

But alongside the names of Kankkunen, Grönholm, Mäkinen, Alén, Mikkola and Vatanen on the winners’ trophy is Meeke's – and that is one hell of an achievement that nobody can ever take away.

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