Juha Kankkunen by then lost the title to Mäkinen. Kankkunen stayed with Ford for the 1998 season with Belgian driver Bruno Thiry as his new teammate, after Sainz had opted to re-join Toyota. Ford was already moving resources into developing the new Ford Focus WRC and the team's last year with the Escort WRC was winless. Kankkunen drove the car on the podium on seven occasions, and both Ford and Kankkunen finished fourth in their respective championships. For the 1999 season, Ford signed the Subaru World Rally Team star Colin McRae and Kankkunen moved to replace him at Subaru. Kankkunen's first year
Colin McRae Rally (video game) an early prototype build of the game, prompting the team to move into full development. Besides providing technical input on the game's handling, Colin McRae and his co-driver Nicky Grist voiced themselves in the game, with McRae himself serving as the Rally School instructor for the game's tutorial mode. The game also included an easter egg in the form of an alien abduction scene where the player's car is beamed upwards into a ship on certain special stages upon activating a cheat code, parodying the alleged abduction of Barney and Betty Hill by extraterrestrials in 1961. By late 2002, sales