The 2023 World Rally Championship (WRC) season was one that produced mixed results for the M-Sport Ford team, which secured a fifth place finish at Monte Carlo, a win in Sweden, ninth overall in Mexico, second place in Croatia, fourth-place in Portugal, third place in Sardinia, eighth place in Estonia, a fourth-place at the Acropolis Rally Greece, a victory at Rally Chile, and a third overall at the brand new Central European Rally, all before closing out the season at Rally Japan with some middling results. On top of all that, M-Sport Ford announced that highly-successful Estonian racer Ott Tänak would be leaving the team at the conclusion of the 2023 season, meaning that a driver shakeup was forthcoming. Now, M-Sport Ford has officially revealed its lineup for the 2024 season.
In the 2024 WRC season, the M-Sport Ford driver lineup will consist of Adrien Fourmaux and Alex Coria, as well as Grégoire Munster and Louis Louka, all of whom will compete in the Puma Hybrid Rally1. Fourmaux and Munster are moving up after spending last season in the Rally1 and WRC2 ranks, and will now tackle the full WRC schedule in the forthcoming year.
Munster – who joined the M-Sport Ford team in 2023 – is also a rising star after having claimed two Belgian Junior titles and several top-five WRC2 finishes since his debut back in 2022. In the Fiesta Rally2 this past season, Munster scored a WRC2 Challenger win in Greece, and he also took home a win in Junior WRC in Estonia behind the wheel of a Fiesta Rally3. This year, he’ll look to continue building on that success while retaining his co-driver, Louka.
“2024 will see us take a new and different approach compared to the last 12 months,” said Richard Millener, M-Sport Team Principal. “Developing and helping young talent prove themselves is an exciting way to tackle a WRC season, and with several of the top drivers not competing across the full championship we have opportunities to put in some strong and surprising performances. We still have all the ingredients to deliver results and the team is motivated to start again in a few weeks’ time with an almost blank paper on what we can achieve. Adrien, Alex, Gregoire, and Louis are all great guys who possess a lot of determination and motivation. A young team can create great energy and great things can come from that so I cannot wait to start working with them all again to show what we know we can achieve.”
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Last name had wrong letter… Rychcik = previous note had it as RychcikA – have no idea how the A was added… Sorry….