Car launches are usually run to a fairly tight brief. From the moment you arrive at an airport in the UK you pretty much have your life mapped out for the next 36 hours or so. You are met at the foreign airport the other end, driven to a press conference, handed the keys to a car, given a choice of two or three pre-determined (and pre-programmed into the sat-nav) road routes and a time to check in at the hotel. Then you’re given a time to meet for dinner, a time for breakfast the following morning and a time to check out in time for the shuttle back to the airport for your flight home. In some ways it’s quite nice and relaxing having your life organised, but just occasionally it’s also quite fun ignoring all that and going a bit off piste…

On Wednesday afternoon last week I was sitting in the evo offices with one ear plugged into the excellent World Rally Radio coverage of the 2012 Monte. I hadn’t actually checked where the following day’s Volkswagen CC launch was but I wasn’t overly concerned. All I knew was that I had to be at Farnborough airport for 07.45 in the morning.

At the end of the day Latvala had just crashed out of a 30sec lead after an incredible tyre choice earlier in the day had seen him gain over 50sec on Loeb in one stage (he and Solberg had put a studded tyre on two diagonally opposed corners of the car and slicks on the other two diagonally opposed corners!). Meanwhile, Sebastien Ogier was in an unbelievable fourth place, despite driving an S2000 car not a WRC car. That’s like a driver rocking up to an F1 race and sticking a GP2 car on the second row of the grid. It was all hotting up and I was a bit gutted I was going to miss the coverage the following day. Then I discovered I was flying to Nice for the VW CC launch.

Well, what you do? I downloaded the stage maps, found a partner in crime (CJ Hubbard from Motoring Research) and when we got the keys to the car at lunchtime on the Thursday I plugged an entirely different destination into the sat-nav. You would have thought that Nice would be perfectly placed for getting to the special stages as it’s only just along the coast from Monte Carlo, but the rally is in fact based up in Valence for the first few days. Valence is about 250miles from Nice...

Several hours later we parked in a field with about 40 other cars somewhere north of the village of Alboussiere. There was no charge and we had about 45mins to kill before the first car was expected so I went for a walk down the road. It might not have been the Col de Turini and there wasn’t even any snow, but it felt blissful to be there in the middle of nowhere. The sense of freedom was a bit like when I used to sneak out of school on my mountain bike up into the Surrey hills.

Loeb slid into view (on his way to winning his sixth Monte) then came Sordo (who took an excellent second place for the troubled Mini team) followed by Solberg in his first rally for Ford. Then there was a slight pause… Ogier had crashed just a few miles up the road (there’s footage in the second video). His giant-killing run was over in spectacular fashion but I hope more than ever that VW can get him into the WRC Polo as soon as possible…

After half a dozen more cars had been through I hopped back into the CC with CJ and we headed back to Nice. By the time we arrived at the hotel we’d missed dinner, and travelled 500miles to watch one stage of the Monte Carlo Rally, but it was utterly worth it.