This season's winter rallies are over and it was time to get back to gravel. This year the waiting wasn't so bad since I managed to co-drive on Isle of Man. I also sold my summer car and had to find another in a bit of a hurry. For those who don't know the Finnish summer is short and if you want to have a convertible you have to act fast to be able to drive it even a litte bit.
The summer part of the season started from Laihia in the western part or Finland. I haven't been a big fan of the area based on two previous years' experiences in Lapua. The roads were really really fast and not that challenging. Laihia luckily turned out to be different. The organizer had managed to find more driveable roads. Now that the roads weren't a problem we in return had other issues. More than one.
The recce went OK. Easy recce since two stages were run twice so you basically had about 60km to put on paper. No sweat. Plenty of time to eat during the recce and bs with other crews. The problems started in the Friday evening scrutineering. For some reason all the cars (at least the crews we discussed with) got 10db higher readings from the sound measurement than normally. Since we are usually at the limit we had difficulties getting the car through. Luckily we weren't the only ones so the issue wasn't fully about the car. Well this was a minor nuisance.
During the scrutineering we had a couple of alarming discussions about tyres. We have been running Pirelli's throughout the season. Good tyres and I have nothing bad to say about them. This time we had K4s with us and they are designed to +20 celcius temperatures. We were looking at +15 for the event and we were warned the tyres wouldn't heat up enough. I wasn't too concerned since last year with Michelin's medium compound you could run also with a bit colder temperatures. Oh boy the people warning us were right. We put the two softer K6s in the front so that we could at least turn the car if the K4s would be as slippy as everybody warned us. They were. It was like trying to drive a shopping cart with stearable front wheels through the stages. No matter how carefully Jari was driving the rear was trying to overtake us all the time. Looking from the co-driver's seat the amount of work Jari had to do was frustrating to watch. Obviously even more frustrating for him. Now we learned a lesson about the tyres.
Another issue was a lack of power. For some reason there are now ponies missing from the engine and we'll take the car to a dyno to find a reason. With the right tyres and with the normal power the next round will hopefully be easier for us. Would be nice to get a trouble free rally since the roads in Kouvola area are really challenging and require all the concentration available if you want to have times near the front runners.
