FRC Mikkeli 2015

Otherwise a nice event with good stages. Except the very mild winter caused the roads to cave in and on some stages the driving was more surviving than rally driving. Couldn't complain in the finish though. We won our class. Had a good fift in the end. The last stage was cancelled. We were leading by 4,7 seconds before the now to be last the stage. We also told to the crew who was second in the class that this would now be the last stage and class victory would be decided on this one. We both drove flat out and we managed to beat them on that stage by 4 seconds. Nice to have a good result after the Arctic retirement.

Waiting for the rally to start next to Mikkeli market square

Waiting for the last stage to start. The front bumper has taken its toll on rough roads.

Arctic Lapland Rally 2015

The Arctic Lapland Rally didn't go as planned with the E36.

The recce was full of peaceful scenery as always. I has even managed to get into the celebration year exhibition with Andreas.

Beautiful

We were taking it easy on Friday. However the car in front of us had spun on a narrow road and blocked the road. We lost 3 minutes helping to lift it out of the snow bank with a couple of other crews. He spun again 1,5km later. This time there luckily was a 1 meter gap between it and the snow bank. We aimed the E36 towards the snow bank and the gap at about 80km/h. Luckily didn't get stuck and only lightly scraped the car blocking the road. Others followed through the whole we made. Still finished the day only 2,5min after the class leader.

Waiting for the start

Waiting for the Mäntyvaara super special

On the Mäntyvaara super special

In the queue for the special stage

Rally glamour. Cold and dark rally car. Wearing a pink blanket.

We started the second day with good spririts, but only 6km from the start the rear bottomed out when crossing a bridge about 130km/h. A rear brake line got caught between the suspension arm and the chassis leaking all the fluids. We drove the rest of the stage (30km) without brakes. Managed to hit 190km/h on the faster sections since there you don't need the brakes anyway. The twisty bits weren't so much fun... Had to retire since there was still a 38km stage left before service break.

2015 season

"Life is meant to be lived sideways" - Dalai Lala. Of course it was Ari Vatanen who said that, but would be cool if the spiritual leader of Tibet would have said that.

So no more 4wd for Jari and me next season for two reasons. 1) Money. It's really expensive to run a 4wd car. Hardly a surprise for anyone. 2) Finnish national homologation for 2015. What is that? It means that it's now possible to apply for a homologation for a car that fits inside the technical rules of the class where it will compete. No special limited edition models so has to have 4 seats originally and a production run minimum 2500pcs.

Mitsubishi was sold and as a trade in Jari took a BMW M3 E36. A familiar car for Jari since he used to drive one before switching to 4wd. We'll be driving the car in the season start Arctic Lapland Rally on the 23-24 of January. The 50th anniversary rally and 290km of special stages. That's about the same as WRC rally Finland. Except no stage is run twice and the longest is 50km long. One thing is for sure. There is going to be some nice slides when the rear tyres search for grip on the snow and ice.

BMW M3

After the first rally there is hope that we'll be running an all new car in Finnish rallies. Jari is building a BMW 125 coupe (E82) and thus utilizing the possibility of national homologation.. That's going to be a beautiful car. I'm pretty sure it will also provide some nice slides for the spectators.

BMW 125 coupe. By the way notice the new blue colour scheme for next season

Finnish championship rallies in Turku and Tampere

Rallying can be cruel sometimes. Turku and Tampere showed how you can turn something bad to worse. I a way Turku wasn't bad. We were driving with a steady pace and coming to the last stage we were third in class. A minor concern was that one of the oil pressure values was sometimes going up and down, but the one was OK. The diagnose was a faulty sensor. Then three kilometres to the stage the engine blew up. A three centimetre hole on the side of the engine. And the car caught on fire. Luckily only a small fire and the fire extinguisher killed it easily. As you can imagine the mood among the crew was pretty low.

A month later the last championship round in Tampere. All the stages 150km of them were old NORF stages so we were really looking forward to the event. On Friday in the dark there was only one stage. Pengonpohja which is my favourite along Ouninpohja and one Itärally stage. With one spin we were still third on the stage. However when driving towards the night service Jari wasn't feeling well. I thought it might be the blood sugar levels even though we had been eating throughout the day. After parc ferme Jari started to vomit and a violent stomach flue lasted the whole night. No chance to start to day 2. That was the end of our season...

Pohjanmaa rally 14th of June, Lapua

Pohjanmaa was the first rally on gravel in the championship. To be honest I wasn't looking forward to it too much. Traditionally the roads in Pohjanmaa have been straight, flat and fast. Long straights and 90 degree junctions in the end. This time fortunately I have to admit that I was wrong. During the recce we found out that there were some really nice stages which turned somewhere all the time. The fast part was still true and this meant that the roads were actually quite challenging.

We started the rally as usual. Finding our own pace since we only had done about 20km of testing and the road we used was much more technical than the fast roads in Pohjanmaa. Nevertheless the first two stages before service felt OK. Playing it safe, but still with OK pace. When queuing to service we were surprised when some of our competitors commented that we have obviously been pushing hard. We asked that what did they meant since we hadn't even bothered to check the results yet and were planing to have look at them at the service. People said that we were actually fourth in class before first service. This of course was great news. Jari has a really smooth driving style and he isn't afraid of really high speeds so these things combined meant that our position was really good. In the incar from the first stage you can see how fast the roads were in some parts. On the almost straight section our car achieved 212km/h according the organizers GPS tracking unit.
Kihlman/Heikkinen Pohjanmaa stage 1

After the service we kept the the same pace and arrived to service at the same fourth place. After the service the stages 5 and 6 were the same stages (numbers 1 and 2) from the morning and those run for the second time. A couple of kilometers after the start of the fifth stage I noticed that Jari had decided to push on this one. Nothing stupid, but I could see that we are driving on the car's and tyres' limits without taking stupid risks. At this point I also made my note reading more aggressive sounding to match Jari's effort level. The result was excellent. Were third fastest on that stage losing only 0,1seconds to Karl Kruuda on his S2000 Fiesta and losing 10 seconds to Jarkko Nikara who really was flying through that 20km stage. This time the GPS tracker hit 216km/h on the fast section.

GPS tracker recorded 216km/h on the fifth stage

On the last stage we started by keeping the same fast rhythm as on the fifth stage. Not far away from the start we saw that Nikara had rolled his car and decided to ease off and play it safe. Never a good idea to crash on the last stage. After Nikara's crash we moved up one place and finished the personal best for both of us with a 4wd car -> third in class! For both of us it felt like victory since we hadn't done much testing before the rally and hadn't really pushed except on one stage.

Picture from rallism.fi and taken by Toni Ollikainen

Now it's again a long pause of 2,5 months before the next FRC round in the end of August in Turku. The plan is to do a little bit of pace note training, work on my hobby cars and just relax during the summer.

Winter season 2014

IT has been a long time since I last wrote to the blog. My excuse is that I became a dad and it has taken a lot of time to learn how to be a good one. Also I usually write my blog during the weekends and I haven't had many spare ones during the winter. Between January 18th and March 8 I had only one weekend of without rallies, weddings, bachelor parties or something other than just sitting on my sofa at home. I felt a bit knackered around middle of March.

But back to business. For this season we changed the car to run on bioethanol which is around 103 octane fuel sold in Finland. The good thing about the fuel is that you'll get 50-100nm  more torque with it. The downsides being that the car doesn't start very well when it's really cold during the winter and the fuel consumption grows about 30%.

Unfortunately the first rally of the season didn't go too well. In the Arctic Lapland Rally we flipped the car on it's side on top of a snow bank on the fifth stage. Not that much damage to the car, but we retired since we lost a lot of time. Where weren't any people in the middle of the forest to flip us back to wheels. For some reason the Arctic Rally seems to haunt me. I have been there three times. On the first time with Andreas in the R2 Fiesta we repaired the car 10 minutes on a stage and after that we have flipped the Evo 9 two times on top of a snowbank with Jari. Still I like it as a rally since it's a proper rally with a lot of stage kilometers.

Walking of to the sunset in Lapland...

Second rally of the season was in Mikkeli as usual. Roads in Mikkeli have usually suited Jari very well since he likes fast stages and he also has a really smooth driving style. Even though we had some problems on the last stage when we practically lost all the brakes 10km before the end we finished 4th in SM1 class. Luckily the last stage was really fast and wide so Jari could keep decent pace by paying attention to having smooth lines through corners.

New colours in the car. White and blue has changed into white and black.

Joensuu was the last rally of the winter season. Or more appropriately the first rally of the summer season? Snow was almost nowhere to be found and sometimes we were driving on gravel or slush. First two stages were the most demanding ones. The first one we took on the safe side since on the slush you don't have much grip and even the winter studs are aquaplaning. For the second one we thought about upping the pace, but after a couple of kilometers there were already two 4wd cars off the road. After that we decided to play it safe. For the rest of the day we kept our pace, but stayed on our comfort zone. In the finish we were comfortably sixth.

No snow or rear bumper. We didn't really hit anything, but the bumpers liked to fall off the car in Joensuu

Now waiting for the summer season which starts in Lapua on the 14th of June. After that it's again 2,5 months of waiting until the next FRC round in the autumn. Next year we'll propably drive more rallies to keep up the routine. This year I don't mind the more leisurely schedule since I'll be able to pass the time by relaxing at the summer cottage, with diaper duty and changing an engine to my hobby car.

SM Castrol rally 27th-28th of September, Tampere

Tampere was the final round of Finnish rally championship. A short list of things that made it a bit special compared to some of the other rallies: it’s the final round of the championship, Jari lives in Tampere so it’s his home rally, the service park was located in Särkänniemi amusement park, only 1h40min drive to Tampere for me through motorway from Helsinki and in Tampere area the stages are usually great.

 

Since it was Jari’s home rally we had a chance of having a small warm up test on Thursday evening. That helped to get into rally feeling when driving in the darkness. When picking up the paper work next morning we noticed that all of the stages were old Rally Finland stages from the 80’s and 90’s so for sure we were in for a treat. After doing the pace notes for last stage called Pengonpohja Jari made a good analysis of the stage -> If a codriver has “a timing problem in his engine” then there is a need for a new chassis for the rally car after this stage”. I agreed with his analysis. Pengonpohja is a great stage which turns and goes up and down all the time.

 

First two stages were driven already on Friday evening. Actually it was the legendary Savo stage which was to be driven twice. First during the daylight and a couple of hours later when we it was dark. We took it with normal pace on both times and the times were good. We were 7th overall, but in the lead wereNikara and Kruuda both with S2000 cars. Among the normal guys driving the whole series we were 5th. So not bad at all.

The morning didn’t start well for us. Jari didn’t find a good rhythm on the really fast Siikama stage and we dropped to ninth. All the stages on Saturday were to be driven twice. The same phenomenon occurred on the first loop and on the second loop. Siikama didn’t go well on either times. After Siikama wasViitapohja and on both times we liked the stage a lot. After Viitapohja was Pengonpohja and on both times after Pengonpohja we were both ecstatic. Have to say that the stage is probably the second greatest stage I have seen. Ouninpohja still being the greatest. Those two stages can’t really really be compared since Ouninpohja is wider road and faster. Anyhow a great stage to end our championship. We ended up 6th in the championship and luckily my mistake in Turku didn’t matter in the standings.

 

This is the time to thank our sponsors for the season. Like always without whom the season wouldn’t have been possible. Big thank you for our mechanics for keeping the car in order and the sprits high throughout the season. After all this is a team sport. Also from my part thanks for Jari. We had a fun season and it’s easy to continue the cooperation for 2014. Our plans aren’t a big secret. The Finnish 4wd class will be divided into two classes. Our plan is to fight in the SM1 –class among the big boys. The class allows quite free modifications to group N cars. We’ll probably just tune the engine a bit, but otherwise keep the car as it is. As usual the season starts with the legendary Arctic Lapland Rally inRovaniemi. So that I wouldn’t keep a three month radio silence from writing a blog I’ll think of something to write about every now and then.