Rovanpera prepares forwrc assault
READY TO REWRITE THE SCRIPT IN THE WORLD RALLY CHAMPIONSHIP THE WORLD RALLY CHAMPIONSHIP
Pontus Tidemand looked slightly uneasy at the question. How best to answer it? What could he say about his then Skoda Motorsport team- mate Kalle Rovanpera? Tidemand's a decent fella and, at 27, he was hardly a spent force in rallying when I spoke to him at Skoda Motorsport's conference in Prague last year. But he'd seen enough of Rovanpera - a driver a decade his junior- to know fighting against the tide of support coming the way of the teenage Finn was futile. "He's not so normal.," Tidemand says. "I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean he's the sort of driver who comes every few years and they're like a freak. He is so quick. When you come to the end of the stage, it's sometimes best thing not to look to his time if it's on the board already." Rovanpera really is that good. Eyebrows were raised when Motorsport News broke the story in the summer that Tommi Makinen had signed the son of one-time world rally winner Hard Rovanpera. Half those eyebrows were raised at the amount of time it took one of the big teams to get this child prodigy on their books. It' sbeen croaHrom the inoinent wooden blocks were screwed to the pedals of a Toyota Starlet and a cushion packed into the seat behind an impatient eight-year-old bound for armfuls of opposite lock on a frozen Scandinavian lake that the future of the family name was safe. Last year, his first in a factory Skoda, was concluded with a brace of WRC 2 victories in Spain and Wales. Not a bad way to celebrate your 18th birthday. This season he has, of course, won his first world title with the WRC 2 Pro crown. That's no more than anybody expected. And actually, he made more of a meal of it than many predicted. Three crashes in Monte Carlo, Sweden and Corsica provided far from the ideal start. Germany, Turkey and Spain also went south from a results perspective. So, what gives? Is the boy really up to the job? Yes he is. And what came in the middle of the season absolutely underlines Rovanpera's ability and, almost as importantly for one so young, his composure. After that most miserable hat-trick of mistakes, he bounced back with a quartet of overall top-10 results in Chile, Portugal, Sardinia and Finland. He trounced everybody in WRC 2 Pro. In a couple of mid-season months he removed Mads Ostberg's hand from the silverware and put both of his around a maiden world title. There was no panic, no stress. Just pace and speed. Serenity is something that has marked Rovanpera's very early career. Admittedly, landing his Fabia R5 on top of a parked car (with a woman still
sitting inside) in Argentina last year wasn’t particularly serene, but Kalle hasn’t looked terribly stressed at any point so far.
Moments after Tidemand’s revelation last year, I found Rovanpera tucking into a vol-au-vent and Appletiser. I asked him when the move would be coming to Toyota. Let’s face it, it’s been on the cards since he was faster than Teemu Suninen and Esapekka Lappi at an early Yaris WRC test in 2016. I know, 2016; he was
16. Still at secondary school!
“Maybe I will drive [the] Skoda for the next two years,” he smiles. There’s nothing flash, no bluster, no bravado about this. It’s a simple statement of fact. “I think I have time.”
And that time is now.
The one man who has seen this coming for the longest is his father Harri.
“I have followed my son for so many years already,” says Rovanpera
Sr, a veteran of the World Rally Championship’s top level. “I’m not worried for the future. We started on the lake, then we went to Latvia with a trailer, the car and us six guys.
“I remember when Kalle was 13, one of the mechanics who has been in rallying a long time, he went with him in the car and came back to me. He said: ‘Hey, hey, hey, Kalle is there’. You know, it’s not so easy for me to say these things as his father, but I think we can see that something is going to happen with Kalle.
“He is 19, but in his mind already he is 25 or 30 years old. For me, I am never thinking about his age, for the last six or seven years he is so professional. It’s not feeling like he is 19 years old. Even when he takes the holiday – like in the summer – he is not going away, he just goes to the workshop and builds an engine or works on somebody’s car with the other guys.”
As he says, Harri has stood at his son’s shoulder throughout his time in the sport. But he understands there’s a line between family life and rallying. He won’t for example, work as his son’s icenote crew in Monte Carlo next month.
“I couldn’t do that job,” he laughs. “I’m
too close and I would have too many eyes. They would be everywhere,
I would be finding all the ice and the sh*t in every corner and slowing him down.”
Talking of round one, Rovanpera Jr’s preparations have already begun for the Monte. He’s in the Alps and back onboard a Yaris WRC for the first time in more than three years.
“The first test coming on these roads,” says Kalle, “it’s not so easy. The car I drove in 2016 was one of the first test cars – it’s a big difference to what we have now.
“But for me, I have to learn in the first part of the season. I have a lot to learn. There are so many different things with this car, it’s so different to the R5 car. In the beginning I will be trying to survive, but after the start of the season, let’s see how it goes.”
Having launched himself into a Citroen team alongside Sebastien
Loeb, Sebastien Ogier is mindful of the potential pitfalls of pulling on your running shoes when, as a World Rally Car rookie, you really should be going out for a walk.
Ogier says: “It’s a great chance for him and we have seen some of what he can do, but for sure, we need to leave Kalle. The best thing for him is to give him time to learn.”
Toyota recruit Elfyn Evans echoes those sentiments and adds: “Kalle’s young in terms of experience, but we’ve already seen him doing some fairly incredible things – in a short space of time, he’s won WRC 2 [Pro] and, like I said, done some remarkable things.”
As one of the younger factory drivers, is Evans looking forward to taking a junior by the hand and walking him through the early years of his career?
“I’m not sure about the holding hands bit,” grins the Welshman, “but, yeah, of course I’ll do what I can. It’s strange, it only feels like yesterday I was getting those first opportunities for myself.
The years tick by so quickly and before you know it you’ve had seven years in World Rally Cars. Like any professional sport, the career is pretty short, so you have to make the most of it.”
Typically sage advice from Evans and Rovanpera’s ready to make the most of it.
He adds: “It’s nice to have Sebastien [Ogier] and Elfyn [Evans] as teammates, they have a lot of experience already. If they are doing something different [with the car set-up] or doing something for themselves then we can learn from that.
“There is, anyway, no chance for me to be fast in the beginning of the season. I just need to learn the car and hang in [there]. I have to learn the new tricks and the speed and maybe after that we can start to try to do some results.”
Given the understandable furore that followed Rovanpera’s announcement as the youngest driver in WRC history to land a full-time, frontline factory drive, you can understand his admission that Rally Finland “could be nice” in 2020. Such sentiment’s not born out of adulation or appreciation. It’s simply because he’ll know where he’s going.
“All of the rallies can be quite complicated this year in the new car,” he says. “I’m looking forward to them all, but with this different style of car, it could be difficult to find quickly the new way of driving with the World
Rally Car. It’s going to be interesting to see them in the new car.
“New Zealand is another one that could be really interesting in these new [2017] cars. Nobody really did that rally for a long time, so it’s quite a new event for us all. That makes it more interesting.”
Already, Rovanpera’s looking for ways to level the playing field. Everybody on the entry list for round one has more experience of a World Rally Car than he does and pretty much everybody has more experience of the rallies too.
Kalle doesn’t have to look far for that experience though.
“My dad can tell me some stories,” he says with a grin.
Harri’s not so sure.
“I can’t tell him anything now,” he says. “The last two years with Skoda has been the most fantastic school for him, fantastic. He has done a lot of testing and worked a lot with the engineers, everything. And anyway, he’s never here now .... ”
Rovanpera smiles at the memory of what he was up to aged 19. The dream was the same, as he watched Juha Kankkunen and Markku Alen at the height of their pomp through the mid-eighties. But Harri’s WRC debut didn’t come until he was 27, when a broken propshaft aboard an Opel Manta stopped him in his tracks on the Leustu stage. Nine years on and heading into the same stretch of road and Rovanpera’s leading his home WRC round in a Peugeot 206 WRC. But Leustu’s curse struck again, he lost the right-front wheel and retired immediately after the stage in 2002.
Never again has a Rovanpera come as close to scoring a victory at home.
Until now.