Plans for season 2012

The plan for season 2012 is to co-drive in the Finnish Rally Championship for Andreas Amberg. Andreas' web pages can be found from www.andreasamberg.com. New web pages will be published before Christmas. After the last rally in September Andreas sold the Honda Civic and we'll be driving a Ford Fiesta R2. Andreas' long time sponsor Trailerikeskus Oy really showed their support by enabling us to compete with the Fiesta next year. First impressions are that it's really a rally car after the group N Civic. Very light, handles nicely and everything is designed for racing. Lacks power compared to the 220hp Civic though, but the other areas of the car compensate the power deficit a lot.

The championship starts from Riihimäki on the 14th of January and one week later we are already off towards Rovaniemi for Arctic Lapland Rally recce. Arctic Lapland Rally is on the 28th-29th of January. After that only one winter rally left in the championship which is Mikkeli on the 26th of February. Summer season starts after a three month break in Lapua on the 9th of June, then Kouvola 14th of July, Siikainen 18th of August and traditional Kerava 15th of September. Somewhere between those days you fill in all the training weekends, own testing sessions, pace note training and physical training. In addition to the "normal" life stuff that people have: visiting your friends, going to parties, national holidays etc. For sure I don't have to spend my time sitting on the couch during Jan-Feb, Jun-Aug.

October-December has now been spent trying to find sponsors, training, booking hotels for the first rallies, planning schedules and so on. Now that Christmas is knocking on the door it's time to rest a couple of weeks before starting final preparations for Riihimäki rally and Arctic Lapland Rally. The "big boys" said that the Fiesta R2 heater isn't really suited for keeping the cabin warm at temperatures below -15 Celcius. As a philosophical question one might wonder that how cold can it be spending 2 days in that kind of a rally car at Rovaniemi when the temperatures usually are between -25 and -35 in the end of January? Luckily the windshield is electrically heated keeping it unrozen. No worries then...