WRC champion Marcus Grönholm travelled to the west of Ireland last week, preparing for the Irish leg of this year's championship. Conor Twomeygot up early to meet him
A hundred metres up the road, a man howls at the top of his lungs: "Any sign of him yet?"
Another man, his companion, is standing on the same patch of ditch where I'm perched. He responds with a bellow that almost knocks me into the field.
"Whoooo?"
The first man is incredulous.
"Feckin' Grönholm, ya eejit. Sure, isn't that why we're feckin' here?"
Everyone in earshot has a chuckle. Sure, isn't that why we're all feckin' here? Marcus Grönholm's appearance at the Galway Rally is a bit like Coldplay turning up at talent night in your local on a Friday night.
You'd happily forfeit the Late Late to hear Chris Martin do his thing in close proximity. Similarly, I was happy to get up at 5.30am and drive 200km to Galway not only to see Grönholm and his Ford Focus WRC in action, but also to meet the Finnish driver away from the bedlam of the World Rally Championship.
The BP Ford World Rally Team hasn't really come to the Galway Rally to compete, but to test. WRC regulations stipulate that competitors have to nominate the countries in which they will do their testing (turning a wheel in another country would be sanctioned heavily) and the purpose of this is to keep costs down.
However, there's nothing in the regulations preventing the team from entering a non-WRC event, like the Galway International Rally, and using the experience to gather valuable data ahead of a WRC competition later in the year. Ireland will host its first-ever World Rally Championship leg in November and because each rally is unique, the Irish event is an unknown quantity for the teams.
The three days the Ford team spent in Galway will help them determine which suspension settings and tyres to use at the WRC rally later in the year, and could prove crucial to the team's overall success in 2007. Like all top sports personalities, Marcus Grönholm has that "other-worldly" air about him. He's astonishingly thin and also very tall, just like his co-driver (and brother-in-law) Timo Rautiainen.
He looks like an Olympic athlete, which is ironic when you consider how the car is largely responsible for most of us getting fatter and lazier with each passing year. However, one peek inside the WRC Ford Focus explains why Grönholm has to be in top physical condition. WRC drivers operate the pedals with their toes (without resting their heel on the floor like the rest of us) and suspend their legs above the pedals while their feet twitch about like a Riverdancer's.
There's no air conditioning in the Focus, so in-car temperatures at rallies in Cyprus and Argentina can reach unbearable levels, but the drivers have to ignore the intense heat and get on with the job in hand.
And, of course, there's the cheery fact that if you hit something hard (which is kind of inevitable), the lighter and fitter you are, the greater your chance of survival.
Although Grönholm is refreshingly candid in his responses ("I don't think the C4 is so brilliant", was his take on rival Citroën's win in the season opener) and will often let his animated facial expressions and yelps of frustration answer awkward questions for him, I wanted to take the opportunity to find out what made him tick. As it turns out, not much. The WRC schedule is punishing and there isn't much time to do anything except rest and spend a little time with his family. The WRC season comprises 16 rounds on five continents, and stretches from January's Monte Carlo rally to the Rally UK in December. When the team isn't competing or travelling between events, it's testing the cars - working to eke out valuable fractions of a second per kilometre to give them the edge in the championship.
Unsurprisingly, with such a relentless schedule, the job of piloting a WRC car has become just that to Marcus Grönholm: a job. Indeed, like so many professional drivers, Grönholm isn't much of a driving enthusiast anymore. Even though his company car is a Focus ST, he uses it to potter to shops in his native Finland and never really takes it out for a blast. "After so many years rallying, it's nice to relax and just drive normal."
We are sitting in the ballroom of the Clayton Hotel in Galway the day before the rally starts. Grönholm will take the WRC Focus out today, too, but every second he spends on the road will be spent gathering data and tweaking the car.
"I am not even thinking about racing, driving, competing. We are just here to test. Of course we want to win but it is not the most important thing. If we are not winning everybody will be 'Ohhhh. . .'" he trails off, but the implication is that everyone will scoff at the factory-funded WRC team if they don't beat the locals.
"So we have to try. They (the other drivers) will want to beat us, so we will see." (As it happens, he won the rally comfortably, beating Gareth McHale by almost three minutes.)
Will you be going 10-10ths then, I ask? "Nooooo," he insists. "I don't want to do any stupid mistakes."
It might seem as if the former World Rally Champion is being charmingly self-deprecating, but in reality it's remarkably easy to make a stupid mistake in rallying. All it takes is a tiny lapse and the 300bhp WRC Focus, the body shell of which alone takes 1,200 hours to prepare, is a €750,000 pile of scrap. If a driver's luck abandons him completely, then he could write himself off too.
Compared to the namby-pamby world of Formula 1, rally drivers have no tyre walls, no gravel traps and no carbon fibre tubs to protect them if something goes wrong. It's a dangerous and unpredictable sport and I'm curious to know if this is a concern to the father of three.
He sighs. "I'm not really thinking like that. Sure, it is dangerous but no more than any other motorsport."
Even though there's talk of retirement at the end of this season, Grönholm is still focused on winning the world championship for Ford. "And if and when you do retire, will you just leave rallying behind and never look back?" I enquire.
"That is my plan," he says, emphatically. "Perhaps I will do something with rallying, but now I need to spend more time with my family. I like to be at home and do normal things."
There's that word again: "normal". Despite his incredible talent and the fact that he's a household name in Finland, Grönholm wants nothing more than to be back with his family leading a normal life, working on his farm in Inkoo.
His modesty is admirable, but somehow I don't think that sentiment would wash with the lads who have travelled all the way from Kerry to stand on a cold, damp ditch for three days, just so they could catch a glimpse of the Flying Finn as he hurtles by.