The red earth stages of Rally Australia are renowned for their slippery and inconsistent nature. While a WRC car can generate huge amounts of grip when the surface is clean and hard-packed, other sections feature a unique type of gravel that can easily bring an unplanned trip to the Outback. Subaru team principal David Lapworth explains more:

"When it's dry in Australia, drivers have to deal with a lot of loose gravel. Quite unlike the Welsh or Finnish surface, it's a sort of pea-gravel and is made up of ball-bearing-like stones that lie on top of a hard base. As each car goes through, it cleans off some of the loose stuff and each successive car gets closer to the hard base underneath which gives much more grip. Therefore for each passing car the road gets a little bit faster as their tyres find more of the hard base. In dry conditions the base is hard and dry so tyre wear is much higher. We therefore have to run a harder compound tyre to resist the wear.

To make matters more complicated, when it rains the opposite happens. The clay base underneath the gravel becomes muddy and even more slippery than the loose stones. As the leading cars sweep the loose gravel off the top, those following run on a surface covered in water, mud and slime. It gets worse as each successive car churns up the mud and it spreads, covering stones and so on. Therefore, instead of getting faster, the road gets slower. In wet conditions there is much less tyre wear because that base is so muddy, so we go for a much softer compound as we're looking to obtain the maximum grip."