Jon Armstrong endured a bitter Rally Chile 2026. The young M-Sport Ford driver crashed on SS8, even after the team had adopted an ultra-cautious strategy with two spare tyres on Friday. Unfortunately, that conservative approach wasn't enough to save the day.
It wasn't the first incident. Since the start of the season, Armstrong had caught the eye with his raw speed in the Rally1 class. A stage win in Greece proved his potential. But since then, a string of mistakes in four consecutive events has prompted team principal Richard Millener to speak out.
Millener sees a pattern linking the Chile crash to similar incidents in Portugal and Paraguay. “There's one type of corner that keeps catching him out,” he told DirtFish. According to Millener, the root cause lies in pacenotes – the corner descriptions read by the co-driver. In a corner that tightens sharply, Armstrong carried too much speed into the first part, leaving no room to negotiate the tightening section.
The problem is exacerbated by Chile's surface characteristics. “There's no margin here. You go wide, you're off,” Millener stressed. He compared it to fast rallies like Estonia or Poland, where small errors can be salvaged. In Chile, every mistake comes with a heavy price. That was evident from the number of drivers who suffered similar fates, including Thierry Neuville, Nikolay Gryazin, and Calle Carlberg.
The big question is why the corner felt safe during recce but changed dramatically at full speed. Millener suspects the time between corners at low speed made everything seem more forgiving. “Back at the hotel, after checking the notes, it was still OK. But when you go through it at speed, it was so wrong,” he explained.
The short-term solution, according to Millener, is experience. Rivals who have competed in Chile three or four times have a better understanding of the surface, even though the stages are run in reverse this year. Armstrong, in his first Rally1 season, still has much to learn. The team plans to re-evaluate how pacenotes are compiled, especially for tightening corners that often catch drivers out.
Nevertheless, Millener insisted there is no blame game. “This is a learning process. We need to make sure the 99 percent of pacenotes that work fine become 100 percent,” he added. Focus now shifts to how M-Sport can guide Armstrong to turn his raw speed into solid finishes for the rest of the season.
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