Toyota ace lays down a marker for rally finland
Toyota star Ott Tanak fired a Rally Finland warning shot with a dominant home win at last weekend’s Rally Estonia.
Tanak faced competition from Craig Breen’s Citroen C3 WRC and the Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC of Hayden Paddon, but eased his way clear of both to deliver a peerless performance in front of a big crowd. Ahead of the event, Tanak had warned the Tatu-based rally would not be representative of what’s to come in Jyvaskyla next week, a view he changed having driven through the specially selected stages.
Tanak told MN: “In Finland we will be using some of the smaller roads and the organisers had worked hard to find some more technical stages for us, this was really useful. As well as that, there were a lot of fast roads with some huge, like really massive jumps in the middle – this was good as well.
“I have only done this event a couple of times, but these are the best roads we’ve had to get ready [for Finland].”
Tanak will join his Toyota Gazoo Racing colleagues Jari-matti Latvala and Esapekka Lappi for a final three-day pre-event test in Finland this week. And last week’s time in Estonia has given a great base set-up to work from.
“We go to the test this week knowing which areas we have to work on,” said Tanak. “We worked a lot with the damper in Estonia – we didn’t change the dampers at every service, but we found a good damper early on and we were working with that one. I think we know what to put in [the damper] for Finland now.”
Tanak won 11 of the 16 stages on the two-day rally. As well as the working towards the next round of the World Rally Championship, this year’s Rally Argentina winner was delighted to see so many of his fans out in force.
“It was a really nice weekend for that,” he said. “The local support was so good – we can see for sure now that Estonia is a big rally country.”
Tanak could only manage 48th fastest on the final Elva City street stage, spending a happy half-minute spinning his Yaris WRC to the delight of the crowds.
Breen was running second before a problem in service dropped him to third ahead of day two. Estonian first-timer Paddon was always in close attendance to the Irishman and moved into a runners-up spot he held until the finish.
“This event was always about next week [and Rally Finland] for us,” said Paddon, who was quickest on one stage. “We’ve changed things after every stage and tried lots of different settings on the car. Stage wins were never the priority for us here, we just wanted to stay consistent. We had a puncture on the last gravel stage, but it’s been a good rally with some big jumps. Thanks to the organisers and the fans – it’s been a nice weekend and we’ve made some good steps towards Finland.”
Breen took three fastest times and plenty of experience from his third visit to Rally Estonia. The Irishman said: “It was a good weekend and we come away not only feeling very confident, but also with some good data in the bank. We started well with a good set-up for Friday’s shakedown and we gradually worked on that basic configuration to pick up pace as the rally progressed. I am very pleased with the work we achieved and I can’t wait to start finetuning the result when we begin our pre-finland testing.”
Citroen team principal Pierre Budar said the Estonian entry was a success for his squad, adding: “Craig was generally around a tenth of a second per kilometre off the times of Tanak, who benefitted from better local knowledge and who will undoubtedly be one of our biggest threats in Finland. So I think we can say it was a successful exercise for us.”