Pirelli rally on the 25th-26th of September 2015

End of the season. For the last Finnish Championship rally in Tampere I switched the codriver’s seat to Antti Selivaara’s GT Corolla. I was really looking forward to the event since the rally had over 150 special stage kilometers and I had never codriven in a GT Corolla. Antti’s cars have a reputation of being some of the most beautiful in Finland so I was really eager to see what the car was like.

Waiting for the start at the horse race track

Eye candy in the form of a toyota engine

On Friday we had only two stages. One spectator stage on Tampere horse race track and one “real” stage in the dark. The real stage was one of the most challenging stages in the Finnish championship. 20km long Pengonpohja. And it was driven in the dark. The feeling in the start of the stage was surreal since when we got close to the start line we could see that fog was landing on the stage. When we started we could see only some 20 meters in front of us. It was going to be a long stage… Luckily the fog disappeared after a couple of kilometers and we could relax a bit. We finished the stage without problems.

The second day didn’t start too well. A long wait in the beginning of the first stage because a Japanese crew had crashed and had to be checked up by an ambulance crew. Luckily the Japanese crew was OK.

A long queue of cars.

After that no hick ups. We drove through the stages with a steady pace. After the first service in the end of a long road section we encountered problems though. The brake pedal went to the floor. A brake caliber was leaking. We decided not to risk it even though there still was some pressure on the pedal. This retirement was the end of my season. I wasn’t too sad though. I had liked the roads, the driver and the car. Also we had driven almost as much as in a normal Finnish Championship rally so it didn’t feel as though we had just started and retired.

So what's in store for next season? Hopefully a busy season. The idea is to drive with Antton in the Finnish junior championship and in the FRC. Most likely we'll skip the Arctic Rally because otherwise our calendar in January-March will be really tight, but  the idea is to replace the Arctic with another rally in the summer time.