McRae had reasserted himself and taken the lead back from his Finnish foe by 3.5sec to start the final day in the lead – but then it all went wrong…
“We were confident that we could pull off the win,” remembers Grist. “But nobody could have foreseen the fly-by-wire throttle failing on the first stage of the last day. It seemed we always had issues of one thing or another on this very same side of the mountain, the Col de Turini.”
All was well with the stationary car, apart from the throttle simply not working. The frustration only grew for the Ford pair.
“Imagine us with sitting right on the apex of a hairpin, then being able to see Mäkinen drive up in front of us, take the hairpin and accelerate away with the lead!” laughs Grist. “And there’s us with a car just ticking over. It was the most frustrating experience. We were on the verge of winning the Monte Carlo.
“It rebooted itself and got going again, only for it to fail once we’d gone over the top of the Col and down the other side.”
Scenes of McRae kicking his Focus in frustration became well-circulated amongst WRC fans, but what happened next wasn’t captured.
“When it happened the second time you know, Colin was enraged,” says Grist. “He ended up throwing our tools at the TV helicopter that was filming us, hovering 200 meters to one side!
“We trundled down the road a bit more, but we had hardly any throttle. The team asked us to adjust the cable. Colin said ‘Where’s the spanners?’ and I said ‘We haven’t got any because you threw them off the side of the mountain!”
As Grist highlights, the randomness of Monte meant it was viewed as somewhat of a free pass, but the next round in Sweden didn’t end up much better, with the Focus embedded in a snowbank early on.
“Just a question of just trying too hard,” says Grist. “Sometimes, just being that little bit cautious, just getting through a situation and coming out the other side of it would have paid dividends. That one incident in itself cost valuable championship points.
“But in hindsight, you’ve got to try as well. You can’t just drive around.
“In the face of adversity, Colin would always push harder and harder where a lot of people would perhaps have a different approach.”
Mechanical failures put McRae out in Portugal and Spain too, meaning that after four rounds Mäkinen was leading the championship with 24 points, whilst Ford’s Scottish charger had none.