Pierre-Louis Loubet explains how happened the car accident he involved in and he is talking about his first season in WRC while he believes that this accident may be happened for a reason.
The French driver secured his first ever season in WRC this year with the private team 2C Competition and he drove a Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC in nine events.
However, he announced earlier this week that he is forced to skip the rest of this season due to the fact that he has to recover from a hip surgery he underwent after having been hit by a car.
Loubet's best result this year was the seventh position overall at Rally Estonia while he had three crashes [Rally Croatia, Rally Portugal, Ypres Rally Belgium] and he suffered mechanical issues in three events [Arctic Rally Finland, Rally Sardinia, Acropolis Rally Greece].
Moreover, he did not partipate in Safari Rally Kenya as Hyundai Motorsport decided to give an oppurtunity to Oliver Solberg to compete there with the Rally1 car of the team, so Loubet was forced to skip this event.
"I was with my friend in a restaurant and when I go out, I crossed the road, a normal road in Paris, and at this moment a guy from my left was coming too fast and it was impossible to avoid him", Loubet said to DirtFish.
"At this moment, I had been able to do a small jump to not be completely broken.
"But I rolled on his car and the impact was quite hard.
"I have been able to be back at home from hospital the day after, the only thing I have to do is stay at home and not move".
Finally, he is referring to the difficult season he had this year and to the journalists' quotes for him: "Maybe it’s better if it stops now. Sometimes it’s not the worst thing.
"If that accident’s happened, I hope it’s for some reason so if I can start thinking about next year and be really focused on my future and start to work now that’s the best thing to do.
"For sure I think I will not be the guy who watches Spain, because when you’re at home and you look from your sofa it’s the worst thing in the world.
"But maybe I will look at tennis more than rallying for sure.
"It’s been so strange first of all because it started not so bad in Monte Carlo, it was my very first time and we were able to do top five times on the Saturday morning on very tricky stages, so sometimes it was working not so bad.
"In Lapland [Arctic Rally Finland] I was really happy about my pace because in the first stage we did the sixth time I think, 0.7s behind Evans or something like that.
"After that I had an issue with the turbo and we opened the road during the two days after that and we always had 0.5s per kilometer gap from the lead on each stage when I was opening the road, I was really, really happy about that.
"And after that in Croatia the times were not so bad, not perfect, and I did a very big mistake.
"From this moment everything went wrong.
"On eight races if you count, there were three mistakes from me, three or four mistakes about the car and after that you have only one good race.
"And the only good one, Estonia, we were completely out of the pace with the set-up of the car.
"The problem I don’t like this year is journalists speak about me a lot, like ‘aw it’s for this reason he’s not doing well’ but they don’t know the truth.
"And first of all they never ask me anything, they read about me some stupid things and that I didn’t like.
"After that the people who speak on social media it’s normal because they can do that, and now it’s our society: everybody speaks on everything.
"This I don’t mind.
"But when the professional people speak when they don’t know, I don’t like that.
"But this is the sport, I can’t do anything about this.
"It’s good if I can say the truth, but it’s been in a certain moment more difficult for my family and the people around me than for me, because for me honestly I don’t look at the social media, I don’t care.
"For me that doesn’t change a lot of things.
"What is more terrible is the fact you fight all your life to be in WRC and when you are there you are not able to show your potential, that’s what’s terrible for me".
Source: DirtFish.com
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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