After Vetomies –rally with my brother it was time to get back to my normal seat in Jari’s evo. I had never been rallying in Turku area so I didn’t really know what to expect. I expected the roads to mostly flat. I wasn’t exactly 100% right on that one. During recce we found out some of the stages to even have some hills erc. We arrived to Turku on Thursday to pick up the recce material. There were two stages already on Friday evening so the recce started early on Friday morning.
Nothing special during the recce. Only nuisance was that the Friday’s stages were quite far from Turku and Saturday’s stages on whole different direction. So during the recce you just had to travel between the stages a bit more than you would have wanted.
Then to the actual rally. Well to put it mildly. Friday was a catastrophe. At least we didn’t wreck the car. So what happened? First of all Jari dropped his classes. He can see pretty well without them, but when you are driving long in the dark and long distances it would have helped to have them. So we took some beating on the stages. That was a minor problem compared to what I managed to do. Something you never do as a co-driver. Never ever. I handed the timecard during the previous minute in the start of SS2. Voilá a one minute penalty! I´ve been through the incident in my head a few hundred times and it comes to a conclusion that I just lost concentration when I was tired. SS1 had to be stopped for 20 minutes right before it was our turn to go to the stages. This of course gave us a good starting position without any dust blocking our lights in the dark. When going to the start of SS2 around 11.30pm I was feeling a bit tired (I usually go to bed around 9.30pm) and I made extra sure that we don’t end up talking bs with Jari and going late to the time control. Since there wasn’t the normal queue of cars in which it’s easy to follow when your turn is. Immediately when Jari stopped to the time control I had handed the timecard. I didn’t even realize it until Jari asked that did I just hand in the timecard. Of course it was no help trying to ask it back. Luckily I managed to pull myself together so much that I read the pace notes OK. For sure the pace notes weren't the primary thing going through my head during the stage.
Feeling not so cheerful we headed to the night service. Without my mistake we would have been 5th in overall standings. Now we were 14th. I felt like gutted. Driver can make mistakes. That’s OK. A co-driver should always be an enabler for a good result. Not a disabler. Of course everybody makes mistakes, but on our level that kind of mistakes should never happen. Forme It's a professional pride thing. During the next morning several other co-drivers approached me and told their stories when they had made the same mistake. Nice for the guys trying to cheer me up. Never the less I was still very down. When queuing for SS3 which was the first stage of the morning a big high speed crash happened for one crew some five cars in front of us. When waiting for the rescue crews to check the crew there was about 45min wait. The crew was luckily relatively unhurt, but had to go to a hospital for a thorough check up. For some reason this extra waiting news from the crew helped me to put the timecard mistake behind me and focus on the stages.
The two stages which were both run twice during Saturday were really nice. Stage by stage we were getting into the spirit. On the very last we really enjoyed ourselves. A very nice, long and flowing stage suited us as a crew. We also climbed the leaderboard position by position. From 14th to 6th. Without my mistake we would have been 4th. That position was only 12 seconds away. Damn… It took me about a week after the rally to not think about the mistake every day. I think it will take some time before I stop thinking about the mistake when I’m handing out the timecard. And that’s a good thing.
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