He started off as we all would: tentatively. But one of the joys of following the Jordan Rally was watching Clark steadily move up the leaderboard as his times improved and his confidence grew. On stage one he finished 38th, but by the final stage he was 11th fastest. Overall he finished a magnificent 12th, 31 minutes behind Mikko Hirvonen but only 12 minutes behind Khalid Al-Qassimi in the A-spec Focus.

"I still can't believe it," Clark said after the rally. "To get this opportunity at the last minute was amazing and to be honest it still hasn't sunk in fully. I had a difficult job to do here and was under strict instructions to finish, and we very nearly finished inside the top ten and just missed out on manufacturer points; that would have really been the icing on the cake."

Boss Malcolm Wilson, the person issuing the strict instructions to finish, was impressed. "This was a huge task I dropped on Barry at the last minute and he has done a superb job to finish the event and bring the car back in one piece. His level of maturity and skill to drive over 350 kilometres in these difficult circumstances has impressed me."

Clark's first proper rallying started in 2000 at the Scottish Rally Championship in a 1.3-litre Vauxhall Nova. The youngster from near Aberdeen then graduated to a Ford Ka then a Ford Puma. He took a break from Fords in 2005, driving a group N Impreza to victory in the British Rally Championship Production Cup, before rejoining the blue oval club by entering the Fiesta Sporting Trophy International event in 2006 and emphatically winning it in 2007.

Clark will be back behind the wheel of a Focus WRC in Turkey, and because he managed to secure funding for two more rallies (no easy task in itself), you'll also get to see him in Corsica and Wales. Matthew Wilson may have a good four years on Clark in terms of age, but both are equally poised to plot a return to British domination of the WRC leaderboard.