TEAMS PREPARE FOR GB CLASH
Toyota driver Ott Tanak is reckoned to have had the best of the pre-rally GB testing, with the Estonian enjoying a day of wet and dry running.
Tanak, who sits 13 points behind series leader Thierry Neuville, arrives in Wales on the back of three straight World Rally Championship wins in Finland, Germany and Turkey – but he says he won’t risk everything for a fourth successive victory this week.
“This is not the place to risk everything,” he told MN. “I will try hard, but there are still two rallies to go after this one, so I won’t go all-out.”
Tanak’s mixed conditions meant he had the opportunity to test Michelin’s new soft tyre in the widest variety of grip levels. The new tyre was actually seen in Finland for the first time, but it didn’t run due to the high temperatures in Jyvaskyla in the summer.
Michelin’s medium cover is the prime tyre with 16 softs available as an option to each crew.
“I had quite a lot of rain on the second day of my test,” said Tanak. “This was a good chance to test the tyre – it worked well in the mud and the wet. We’ll have to see what the weather is like for the rally before we decide if we can use this for a full loop of stages for 80km. If it’s dry, it could be a lot for the tyre.”
Tanak’s former M-sport team-mate Sebastien Ogier admitted his time on the soft Michelin hadn’t been ideal.
“We had a dry day on the first day and then some rain but drying on the second day,” he said. “It’s never possible to have the perfect conditions in the test for this rally and probably it’s going to be a bit more wet in the rally, but let’s see. How the soft tyre will work will be a question mark for me going into the event – I won’t have the experience of the tyre; I tried it, but we didn’t have the condition to see the benefit. The good thing is that we all have the same tyres and the same number of tyres. It’s the same for us all.”