Testing incident ‘biggest crash’ of career
Kiwi rally driver Hayden Paddon has revealed he would not have done anything differently following the ‘‘biggest crash’’ of his career.
A high-speed crash in testing, yesterday, ended the Geraldine driver’s Rally Finland campaign before he even made the start.
Paddon, who was controversially dropped by Hyundai for the 2019 season, secured a one-off drive with World Rally Championship (WRC) team M-sport for Rally Finland thanks to financial backing from a group of New Zealand sponsors.
But his Ford Fiesta was so badly damaged in the testing crash, it could not be repaired before the beginning of the rally tomorrow. M-sport Ford team principal Rich Millener immediately absolved Paddon of blame for the accident.
‘‘It’s a horrible situation for Hayden. The guy’s just having the worst luck right now. Unfortunately, this is the risk you run when you test with your entry car,’’ Millener told Wrc.com.
Paddon was left devastated by the crash. ‘‘I’d say I’m gutted, but that doesn’t come close. We put everything into this,’’ Paddon told Wrc.com.
‘‘After all the effort so many people have put into this, I just don’t know what to say. It’s sport. ‘‘Sport can be like this, you know. You can’t have the roses every day. For the absolute highs to matter and mean so much, you have to have absolute lows and this is one of them.’’
Paddon said the point of a test was to push the car hard to get the most out of it and ‘‘you can’t just drive around’’.
‘‘Having said that, after the accident, I thought about things and asked myself ‘so, what would I have done differently?’ And the answer is actually nothing. That’s one of the things that’s actually so hard to accept,’’ Paddon said.
The former Hyundai driver was about to compete in his first WRC event since finishing second in Rally Australia 2018 last November. He only had one day of testing in Finland before the rally started.
Paddon told Wrc.com the high-speed crash occurred when he and co-driver John Kennard, of Blenheim, came around a blind corner and hit a rock that was on the road.
Neither Paddon or Kennard were injured in the violent crash.
‘‘The corner’s pretty much flat out, but the approach to it is blind because of a small crest. We came over that crest committed to the corner and on the same line we’d been on plenty of times before and the rock was just sitting there,’’ Paddon told Wrc.com.
‘‘If you move even half a metre offline at that speed, it’s the end, you’re gone. We hit the rock right in the middle of the car and it just threw us off line and straight into the trees. At that speed, on a narrow piece of road like that, there’s nothing you can do.
‘‘It was the biggest crash I’ve had, certainly the one with the highest speed. When we got out of the car, the sump guard is actually split in half. The rock we hit is still there with a load of aluminium on it,’’ Paddon told Wrc.com.
Millener said Paddon and Kennard ‘‘were just passengers’’ and nothing could be done after the pair hit the rock.
‘‘You can’t go into every corner lifting off in case you’ve pulled a rock out. It’s the nature of testing, you’re always going to be the first person to find anything you’ve pulled out on the previous run,’’ Millener told Wrc.com.
He said the M-sport team had tried desperately to find an alternative way to get Paddon to the start line in Finland this weekend.
‘‘The first reaction from Malcolm [Wilson, M-sport managing director] was to find a way to get him to the start,’’ Millener said.
‘‘But it’s just not possible. The car needs to be put on a jig and it’s not possible to get another car out there in time,’’ Millener said.