POP Pankki -rally 9th 0f June 2012

After a long spring break from rallying it was finally time for the next Finnish rally championship round in Lapua. The roads were known to be extremely fast since we the stages are the same as last year. In 2011 I was co-driving for a car which rolled on the second stage so I was hoping not to repeat that experience.

We made whole new pace notes even thought we could have used Andreas' old ones from 2011. There have been some improvement in the notes and time wise you don't even save much when using the old ones. The schedule was really relaxed during the recce and we had plenty of time to make sure we ate enough and maxed our energy resources for the next day.

Andreas and Esapekka Lappi before the start of the rally. Picture by "Jack Bacon".

On Saturday the first one was a really fast over 20km long stage. The specialty of the stage was a 5km long very fast tarmac section. The stage seemed to go fine, but we lost 10 seconds to Jukka Korhonen who was fastest in our class. 

Picture from a first stage junction. Taken by "Jack Bacon".

After the first stage we already had first service where we decided to push harder on the second one. Our concentration was tested in the start of the stage where a red flag was raised and we had to wait in the car for 15 minutes for a restart. Somebody's car was blogging the road. We pushed quite hard right from the beginning. We overshoot one junction quite early in the stage and later almost went off the road. The stage seemed very slippery and Fiesta's rear tried to overtake us from time to time. We lost only 10 seconds which was OK all things considering. Link to youtube  In-car special stage 2 We had a bit of a moment at 6min30sec. 

On the third stage we drove OK and lost 5 seconds. That seemed a bit odd since we didn't make any notable mistakes. After third stage we had the last service. Jukka was leading the class quite cofortably, but second place was still possible for us with a little bit of luck. We decided to push on the last one. The last stage was first one driven again. We wouldn't be able to drive the stage much faster than that. We improved our stage time by 15 seconds. Still we lost 0,6 seconds to the fastest time in our class. In overall results we were fourht in class and dropped to third place in the championship. Not the end of the world. After the rally we found out that the differential wasn't probably working OK. So in the future some work with the car and testing for setups. Then the next championship round on the 14th of July in Kouvola.