How Tanak took the Arctic Rally
The Hyundai star made up for a disastrous Monte Carlo Rally by leading all the way on the snow-kissed stages of the Arctic
Finland’s Arctic Rally, drafted in at the last minute to replace Rally Sweden as the second round of this year’s World Rally Championship, allowed Hyundai star Ott Tanak to kickstart his 2021 season with an assured win after scoring no points on last month’s opener in Monte Carlo.
With Sweden abandoned in the face of a dramatic increase in the number of coronavirus cases this winter, the WRC grabbed with both hands this opportunity to move north into the Arctic Circle, with the promise of snow. The pre-event form book tilted strongly towards Toyota being the dominant force. For one thing, the team is Finnish to its core. For another, its young star Kalle Rovanpera won the event in 2020. You could also add that the team’s talent manager, former Intercontinental Rally Challenge winner Juho Hanninen, won the event in its traditional January slot on the domestic calendar at the wheel of a Yaris WRC. And let’s not forget that Toyota’s rivals at Hyundai and M-sport were left in shell-shocked disarray after the opening round, where Yarises filled four of the top six places on the Monte.
One member of the Toyota squad who did not hold such high expectations was Monte Carlo winner Sebastien Ogier. The Frenchman knew that the honour of running first on the road for Day 1 would result in him sweeping the roads for those behind him, and that when the road order was swapped for Day 2, with the slowest going first, he would likely still be clearing a path for the rest. “For me the question mark is always going to be being first on the road on that one,” he said before the start. “I need to pick up a better start position for the rest of the event and that’s the plan for tomorrow, to try to give everything from the start.”
The first day was always going to be tricky for Ogier from that perspective. It consisted of a single stage, Sarriojarvi, run once in the afternoon sun and once after dark. At 19 miles it was one of the longest stages on the rally, starting with tight and technical turns and then heading out onto long, undulating straights. After the second pass the gap to rally leader Tanak, winner of both stages, was a thumping 49.8s. “We’ll see what we can do tomorrow, but it looks like we will be quite far away already,” Ogier concluded.
Tanak had meanwhile built up a decent cushion of 16.2s over his Hyundai teammate Craig Breen, the Irishman making his first WRC appearance since last September’s Rally Estonia. Rovanpera sat in third, with Thierry Neuville making it three Hyundais in the top four.
Being slightly larger than the Yaris, all of the i20 WRCS showed battle damage at the rear as they tended to clip the snow banks rather more often, but of more importance was that they were clearly able to take less life out of their tyres than the Toyotas. Managing this process was something with which the Hyundai’s bigger footprint clearly gave its crews an advantage. After their dominance in Monte Carlo, the Toyotas suddenly seemed rather less assured.
“I have to say that it’s also part of the job done to prepare this Arctic Rally because we work a lot on the tyre management and these kind of things, because it was clearly our very weak point in Monte Carlo,” said Hyundai team principal Andrea Adamo. “You know, when you made something like what we did in Monte Carlo, you have to deeply analyse your mistake and understand where you were especially weak… We were very bad to say the least, so here we work very hard.”
Indeed, so much confidence did Hyundai’s review inspire that Tanak elected to carry only one spare wheel – that was a strategy that proved costly in Monte Carlo, forcing his retirement after two punctures in a row. But in Finland, his decision, when combined with careful curation of his rubber, allowed the Estonian to take full advantage of the 23kg weight saving that came from dumping the precautionary spare.
Saturday was to provide the only full day’s running, with a single loop of three stages run in the morning and repeated in the afternoon. Tanak sat 13th on the road and enjoyed the clearest path possible. After building his lead through the morning,
“You have to deeply analyse your mistake and understand where you were especially weak”
it was clear that only misfortune stood between him and victory.
Of rather more dramatic interest was what was happening in his wake, as all three of the potential podium finishers began to find their pace blunted. In Breen’s case, a degree of rustiness was the primary cause of his slide back down the order. On stage after stage he berated himself for not taking advantage of the ‘perfect’ car and the ‘perfect’ road position he had earned from his labours on Friday. Breen found himself pushing to go faster but, when he got up to the sort of speed he desired, his tyres began to go off under the strain. Catch 22. Or ‘shite’, as he put it on live TV.
Maintaining tyre performance was also a preoccupation for Rovanpera as he took second place, but could make no further inroads on Tanak’s lead. As Rovanpera struggled to find a set-up that worked for him, it was his more experienced Toyota
team-mate Elfyn Evans who became the first man to beat Tanak to a stage win, claiming SS4 with a gritty performance as he fought to get in among the podium battlers.
Neuville was proving rather more adept at conserving his rubber, but admitted that he and new co-driver Martijn Wydaeghe had yet to gel on this event, even going so far as to suggest that he spoke the wrong language. “I struggle to clearly understand sometimes the notes,” Neuville said. “But anyhow I try to be very focused and do my job, go the rhythm I can go and sometimes I know I have to slow down, but we did the best out of it what we could this morning.”
Just as it seemed as though this unhappy Belgian ship was about to drift back into the clutches of Evans, however, the pairing came alive on the afternoon loop. Their day ended with a sensational second run through the Siikakama stage in the dark that was 12.3s faster than anyone else. “It was a really good stage, yes,” Neuville said. “Since the communication is working better, I can push harder without making mistakes, but we still need to improve. I’m not happy yet: we need to work on the system to get it better.”
That final stage was also remarkable as it brought a premature end to Ogier’s day, only 50 metres from the finish line. The reigning world champion ran a little wide entering the closing S-bend and wound up buried deep in the snow bank, climbing from his car, only to be confronted by the yellow marker board to denote the start of the flying finish. “Just tyre wear gone, obviously, I guess like for everybody,” he said after digging himself out. “It’s a weekend to forget when you come here first on the road, so at the end of the day not that bad.”
Ogier’s misfortune promoted Oliver
Solberg into sixth place overall on his debut in a WRC car, driving for Hyundai’s ‘B’ team. The 19-year-old had taken full advantage of his opportunity, setting the third fastest time on stage three and seldom dropping out of the top five fastest times on any stage, although a costly overshoot had prevented him from getting much further up the overall order. Even so, Solberg was doing a solid job in keeping ahead of Toyota’s Japanese protege Takamoto
Katsuta and the M-sport Ford Fiestas of Teemu Suninen and Gus Greensmith, despite losing regular co-driver Aaron Johnston to a positive COVID-19 test – his seat was ‘kept warm’ by Seb Marshall.
Another unexpected departure on Saturday night befell local veteran Janne Tuohino thanks to a bizarre incident at his hotel. He was running in 12th overall at the wheel of a privately entered M-sport
“When you come to a new event you never know what to expect. The pressure was there for sure”
built Fiesta WRC, and had decided to treat himself to a sauna in the evening. Tuohino slipped, dislocating his shoulder and going out of the rally.
Sunday consisted of just one stage, the 13.96-mile Aittajarvi test, run twice with bonus powerstage points on offer on the second pass. With 24s in hand over second-placed Rovanpera, Tanak merely had to cruise, but Rovanpera now had Neuville less than 2s in arrears, with second place on the rally for either man handing him the drivers’ championship lead.
Rovanpera was only 0.1s faster than Neuville on their first pass through the stage, but then he claimed a close powerstage win to end the event as the youngest-ever WRC points leader. “This weekend I wanted to fight for top place and I made a mistake and it was not in the optimum pace,” he said. “But I have to say I was pushing the whole weekend, maximum all the time. I think it was a good weekend from my side.” Breen went second fastest, 0.1s ahead of Neuville and inadvertently denying his team-mate an extra powerstage point. Solberg briefly threatened to gatecrash the party with a raucous effort, but this ultimately came to naught when he took too big a bite out of the snow banks and spun close to the end of the stage.
None of the drama altered the fact that, with five stage wins from 10 completed, the weekend belonged to Tanak. “When you come to a new event you never know what to expect,” the winner said. “This weekend we came to Finland, kind of home country of Toyota, and I mean also Rovanpera was expected to be very strong. So the pressure was there for sure, and then we knew it’s going to be very complicated to take the fight, but in the end I think we did a very good weekend… Just enough and nothing too much.”