It wasn’t intentional. Honestly. Apologies if the April 1 date of our story about the Ford Puma replacing the Fiesta as M-Sport’s World Rally Car of choice from 2022 gave a few of you a bum steer. Forget the date, it’s happening.

A few of you have been in touch admitting you wish it had been an April Fool’s story. The crossover SUV’s not everybody’s cup of tea. But it is where the market’s at right now. Unthinkable as it might be, there’s a cloud hanging above the future of the Fiesta road car. Earlier this year, production of Britain’s best loved B-segment motor was cut at Ford’s Cologne plant and the numbers aren’t working in a way they once did.

But the SUV? Everybody wants one (hence the reason why Toyota reportedly seriously considered the C-HR as a base car instead of the Yaris). And especially if they’re hybrid – which this year’s all-new Puma is. Mostly. You can buy a pure-petrol one-litre Puma, but the most popular will be the mild-hybrid version.

Talk to Ford’s biggest cheeses and they’ll tell you they expect half of their new car sales to be of electric or hybrid cars from 2022 onwards. It’s for that reason that the WRC’s move to hybrid is vital. Had the next generation of World Rally Cars not come with some sort of alternative energy, two of the current three manufacturers would have walked.

M-Sport and Ford still won’t confirm plans for 2022, but the Puma makes complete sense.

Admittedly, in road car trim the Puma is 54mm taller than the similarly road-going Fiesta, 146mm longer and 71mm wider. In terms of girth, the Puma SUV is just 70-mil shy of the width of a Fiesta WRC.

But don’t fret. And don’t forget, this is M-Sport we’re dealing with. M-Sport has a habit of making the humdrum into something very special. By the time M-Sport’s head of rally engineering Chris Williams has finished with the Puma, it will look stunning. And, by no means, an assault on the senses.

It won’t be a big, wobbly crossover that takes the start of the 2022 Monte Carlo Rally, it’ll be a be-winged, scaled-down version that exits the Casino Square start silently before setting about the French Alps with a bark and a bite just the same as the Fiesta WRC we’re watching (or were watching) this season.

Remember Volkswagen’s Dakar-bound Touareg? That was scaled, to around 80 per cent of the road car. Beneath the plastic, it was a spaceframe chassis designed around the precise needs of the world’s longest off-road rally.