ROVANPERA IS ANOTHER DOMINANT FINNISH WINNER
Twelve months ago, Kalle Rovanpera was just over a day away from a dream result on his debut at his home round of the World Rally Championship. Just at the point the then 17-year-old was starting to think about a WRC 2 class win, the front-left damper made a bid for freedom through the bonnet.
Fourth in class didn’t have quite the same ring to it.
This time, there was no stopping him. He dominated proceedings from the very start and looked entirely comfortable as he guided the Skoda Fabia R5 evo to ninth place and a near five-minute WRC 2 Pro win over M-sport’s Eric Camilli.
The only other WRC 2 Pro competitor, Eerik Pietarinen – another Finn in another latest-spec Fabia – didn’t last long. His car caught a bump in stage two and turned left into a bank. The radiator and engine were too damaged to continue.
In all honesty, it would have been difficult to see Pietarinen or anybody challenging the masterful Rovanpera, who took another mighty step towards the inaugural Pro title.
Certainly Camilli wasn’t about to challenge him. The Frenchman was woeful and struggled to show any kind of pace in the latest piece of kit to come out of Cockermouth. Fortunately for M-sport, Takamoto Katsuta put up some sort of a fight in another of the latest-spec R5 Mk2s, but his challenge faltered when he knocked a wheel off on Saturday.
Pierre-louis Loubet continued an upward trend in terms of his speed aboard an olderspecification Fabia R5 and the Frenchman looked to have the WRC 2 category licked before he went off the road on Saturday’s penultimate test.
That accident left Russian Nikolay Gryazin leading Hyundai’s favoured Finn Jari Huttunen into the final day by 12s. Gryazin dealt with the pressure superbly and brought his Skoda home for a welldeserved (if hard-earned after backing it into a Moksi log pile on Friday) maiden WRC 2 win.
“I wanted to drive consistently on this rally,” said Gryazin. “Apart from the log thing, I think we did that. To win WRC 2 on my first time competing in this rally is something which is really nice for me.”
Huttunen was second with two-time FIA World Rallycross Champion Johan Kristoffersson making a very welcome appearance in the WRC to take his Volkswagen Polo GTI R5 to a hugely credible third in WRC 2.
Kristoffersson struggled in the ruts (“we don’t have so many of these in the Swedish Championship rounds!”), but drove his trademark faultless event to take the bottom step of the podium.
Tom Kristensson moved back to the top of the Junior WRC table, beating his main title rival Jan Solans into second place. Just one point splits the top two as they head into the final round of the series in Wales.
Swede Kristensson won by almost a minute and a half, but that margin was bolstered after Dennis Radstrom, who’d kept the leader honest for much of the event, crashed on SS21.
Kristensson said: “The rally has been so good from the first metre and we have been so consistent and so fast, but still safe. No moments and no troubles. I really like this surface, this kind of fast roads and the jumps.”
Brit Tom Williams endured a nightmare event, cracking the sump on day one and rolling out of day two.