INGRAM IN TOP SPOT AS AL-ATTIYAH WINS
Brit puts himself on the verge of the ERC title.
Chris Ingram believed he’d been just a bit too safe at the end of the opening leg of the Cyprus Rally and feared his European Rally Championship title dream was beginning to fade.
He was down in fourth overall and more than two minutes adrift of his nearest title rival Alexey Lukyanuk after the Nicosia superspecial.
“We’ve gone way too conservative to avoid damaging anything in the bumps and bad dips,” he said on Saturday evening. “Tomorrow we need a full-attack set-up, which is so much faster. We didn’t have problems today and maybe it’s because we were way, way too safe.”
While Ingram did make tweaks to his Toksport-entered Skoda Fabia R5, they didn’t trigger a major upturn in pace, but neither was that really the intention.
“We decided before the start we’d let Nasser [Al-attiyah] and Alexey fight it out, we had our own game plan to get to the finish,” said Ingram’s co-driver, Ross Whittock.
Ingram and Whittock did indeed get to the finish – in third place behind Simos Galatariotis and Nasser Al-attiyah, the latter scoring his sixth victory on the Cyprus Rally. But when Galatariotis was excluded for a parc ferme infringement, Ingram was promoted to second which handed him a 19-point margin ahead of Lukasz Habaj in the title chase with just the all-new Rally Hungary left to run on November 8-10.
Despite an electrical issue leaving his Fabia on 30 per cent power, Habaj made it home in fourth to move back into second in the standings with nine points more than Lukyanuk.
The defending ERC champion stopped on SS10 with a technical fault on his Citroen DS 3 R5, his hopes of a successful title defence seemingly on the brink.
Although Lukyanuk’s demise and problems for Habaj weren’t necessarily self-inflicted, by taking it steady from the start Ingram’s prospects of becoming a first British ERC champion since Vic Elford in 1967 look brighter. Providing he can get the money together to continue his unlikely title challenge, of course.
“We start from scratch,” he said of his funding bid at the finish in Larnaca. “I’ve got a few leads and this result helps, but I won’t stop working, I won’t give up on this.”
Former World Rally Championship star Mikko Hirvonen’s first ERC outing in 17 years on what was a one-off drive in a Ford Fiesta to “have fun” netted third place when Galatariotis was punished. Apart from a brake issue on leg one, little troubled the Finn, who helped Ingram’s title prospects by taking points away from Habaj.
But nothing could be taken away from Al-attiyah. Fastest on 10 out of 12 stages in his Volkswagen Polo GTI R5 it was another hugely impressive performance from the Qatari, who wrapped up a 15th Middle East title during the weekend. A gear linkage pin falling out aside, Al-attiyah excelled on the rough, twisty, mainlygravel stages, the only battle wound a broken front bumper after he swerved off line to avoid a rock on stage nine. Despite the lack of trouble, Al-attiyah reckoned this was the “toughest” Cyprus yet.
“Going back to the Troodos mountains was great, but it was really hard,” he said.
EX-GT racers and former team-mates Niki Mayr-melnhof and Albert von Thurn und Taxis completed the top six ahead of Chilean ERC rookie Emilio Fernandez.