Riding shotgun with Sébastien Loeb

The water is too hot. We must stop, right now,” said Sébastien Loeb calmly over the in-car radio and the roar of the engine. Perhaps the greatest rally driver in history has dealt with more pressing problems in his time, but sitting in the passenger seat of the rally-prepped Alpine A110, a wave of adrenaline rippled through me.

Loeb eased off the throttle and the Alpine coasted to a halt on the side of the mountain track. “Get out,” he said. Which I did, sharpish. A cloud of steam was rising from the rear-mounted engine mingling with dust that the car had kicked up.

Moments earlier we had been speeding upwards somewhere in the Massif des Maures hills near St Tropez at white-knuckle speeds. Loeb in Red Bull race suit throwing the weight of the car backwards and forwards with throttle and footbrake as we approached each bend balancing it on a tightrope and controlling the momentum with instinctive ease then brutally yanking the hydraulic handbrake to slither around the hairpins. Hard on the power and the speedo reached 60mph as we hurtled towards the next bend, nothing but an olive tree between us and a sheer drop the other side. I reminded myself that as well as his nine WRC titles Loeb also once set the record for the Pikes Peak hillclimb which this road was beginning to resemble.

Then came the bone-shaking bang as the car sped over a depression in the road and bottomed out. We would discover later that the force of the impact had broken a coolant pipe and left a trail of liquid along the road. Loeb shrugged as he inspected the damage and the support crew arrived. “They will fix it,” he said.

Eighty WRC rally wins, victories in the World Touring Car Championship and World Rallycross Championship, plus a title in Extreme E, the Frenchman’s record is eye-rubbingly impressive. He has raced at Le Mans finishing second, attempted Dakar eight times and finished on the podium five times (though never won it) and earlier this year won the Race of Champions for the fifth time at the age of 51. Loeb has been named French Sportsman of the Year twice and been made Knight of the Legion of Honour. And in 2016 readers of this magazine voted him in to our Hall of Fame.

But even greats must slow down eventually. When I met him in the south of France, Loeb is as close to being off-duty as you imagine he ever is, albeit working with one of his sponsors, the watchmaker Richard Mille, with whom he has been a partner since 2012. Part of his work was giving people like me a high-speed drive up the mountain path – where our first run ended with that busted coolant pipe. Out of the car he was in relaxed, and for a famously taciturn driver, talkative mood.

Let’s start with who he regards as the best he competed against: Loeb doesn’t hesitate. “I probably had my biggest battles with Marcus Grönholm,” he says. “We duelled quite fiercely, and he was incredibly fast, but maybe he made mistakes too often. It’s possible he was a bit faster than me, but I was more consistent.”

What about his team-mates? “In my first full season, Sainz and McRae were my team-mates. I thought to myself: ‘Now I’m going to find out if I have what it takes.’ And I promptly won the first rally, Monte Carlo, ahead of McRae and Sainz – a 1-2-3 for Citroën. Then I knew I could compete at the front on both asphalt and gravel. That was a key moment in my career. Fom that point on it was clear to me that I could become world champion.

“One reason for my success was that I had a really good system with the pace notes. My records were very precise – that gave me confidence. I could drive cleanly, with a calm style, didn’t have to be aggressive because I knew exactly what radius each corner had and how I had to drive.”

We meet just before Le Mans so talk about his adventures with Henri Pescarolo’s team. Second place in 2006 felt like victory given Audi’s dominance at the time, but it was the 2005 near-miss that still stings. In a competitive car, team-mate Soheil Ayari spun in the 19th hour after picking up a puncture.

“I’ve never seen anyone as angry as Henri after that accident,” Loeb recalls. “But it was a great experience. I wasn’t used to driving with [open cockpit] prototypes, with your head in the slipstream. That was a lot of fun! Driving prototypes was such a different experience from rallying.”

Years later, at 40, Loeb made his strategic pivot from rallying to circuit racing, driven by a simple realisation: “If I want to do something else, I should do it now, otherwise I’ll be too old.” His Citroën WTCC campaign and GT adventures followed, but ultimately reinforced his love for rallying’s unique challenges. “In the end I found that I still prefer driving in the WRC,” he explains. “On circuits, the ratio wasn’t right between all the meetings you have and the time you actually spend driving. I like the driving experience – I don’t need all the meetings around it.”

He won’t be drawn on whether he might repeat a WRC cameo like the one in 2022 which landed him another Monte win saying it wouldn’t fit with his current Dacia Rally-Raid programme. “I can’t compete for Dacia in Dakar and Hyundai in WRC.” he says. “And five events per year [is good] and I still have lots of fun. You reach a point where you want to be home a bit more.” Not that he has gone too soft, slipping in that his Richard Mille watch has survived “two rollovers at Dakar and two in the Abu Dhabi desert challenge”.

He says he is enjoying time with his family – he flies his daughter to her gymnastics classes in his helicopter and enjoys his garage including a Ferrari F355 (“the first car I really liked”), a Renault 5 Turbo (the first car he owned), and modern machinery including a Ferrari SF90. He bridles at suggestions it is a collection: “My passion is driving not cars,” he insists. “The best car for me is probably a WRC car, but I can’t drive that on the road!

“I also have motorcycles, 15 or 20, but that’s not a collection either. Everywhere I have a residence, there are three enduro bikes in case friends come by. I spend my time on things I like, and I’m satisfied with my life,” he says.

Any regrets? “No. I started as an electrician and I’m a nine-time world champion – I can’t regret anything!” Except perhaps the odd broken coolant pipe.