TANAK FLIES THE HIGHEST IN FINLAND
There was no stopping Tanak’s Toyota march to a second Finnish success
Standing at the side of a road called Seppalantie near the main drag through Pihlajakoski, the world could wait. The locals had waited long enough. Standing in a field between two of the thousands of lakes which patchwork this landscape, the sound of a Finnish forest waking up was unmistakable.
Cans of Lapin Kulta were opened to wash down Grillimakkara sausages cooked over log fires which doubled – unusually for this time of the year – to offset an early autumnal onset. Actually, as 0800hrs neared, it was freezing. And almost raining.
Nobody cared. The cars were coming.
The wait was almost over. The agony of the previous 11-and-a-bit months nearly done.
Minutes later, the World Rally Cars arrived to slash through the scenery at unflinching speed matched only by innate precision. This. This moment. This 100mph collision of mind-bending speed, noise and colour is what places Rally Finland at the very centre of everything cherished by those who hold rallying close.
It’s that special. Every time.
And that’s just for us mere mortals standing watching. To be in the car is something else. Something different.
And to succeed at something different requires a reworking of what you might consider sensible.
As is always the case at this time of the year, Jyvaskyla was packed with heroes past and present. Between these four – Marcus Gronholm, Markku Alen, Juha Kankkunen and Tommi Makinen – there were two decades’ worth of victories on the one they all want to win.
“How to do it?” smiled Gronholm, “This is what you want to know…”
The lanky seven-timer grinned and kept his counsel.
Alen obliged: “First thing, morning of rally is switching off a little bit the brain. Make head clear and then, hey boys, you follow me. Fastest straight away. Stage one: bang. Then we go.”
Makinen agreed: “You need to be like a robot. You focus on the road and nothing else. You don’t take anything else to the head. Switch off from everything else.”
The Toyota Gazoo Racing team principal paused for a moment to watch one of his
Yaris WRCS – the one with the Estonian flag on – cross another finish line for another stage win. “This is what Ott is doing,” he added. “Ott is robot now.”
It wasn’t just impossible to argue. It was entirely pointless to argue. The championship leader’s speed was as metronomic as it was predictable. Not to mention very, very fast.
Not through years of French domination of rallies – not even through Sebastien
Loeb laughing in the face of anybody who fancied a Germany win or Sebastien Ogier’s vice-like grip on Monte Carlo – has one driver come to a WRC round with the odds stacked so firmly in his favour.
Three weeks ago, Tanak had taken his colleagues apart in a startling demonstration of fast gravel driving that left him a minute up on a factory Hyundai, Ford and Citroen after just
90 miles of Rally Estonia competition.
Notice, as if it were needed, had been served. On Sunday, Tanak completed the job and delivered a drive equal in its brilliance to any of the Finnish masters mentioned above.
First on the road on Friday, the championship leader knew his grip would be compromised as he swept the line clean for those following. Finland’s never as bad for loose gravel as places like Sardinia or Mexico, but braking for junctions after time on the rev limiter in top was an eyeopener for Ott. Not that he talked about it.
He just got on with it. Only on Friday evening did he open up a bit more.
“This morning was really important,” he told MN. “You can’t be slow in the start of any rally but, for sure, if you give away 10 seconds on the first day here, then you can be finished and you are far away.
“I knew this morning I had to really work to make the times. On the second loop it’s always a bit more difficult, because everybody knows the limits and the roads are so fast and you can’t make any difference.”
The lack of junctions and twisty sections – even on a route which again sacrificed classics in favour of the smaller, narrower roads necessary to sate the FIA’S obsession with average speeds – make it harder to haul tenths of seconds out of corners.
Good as his word, Tanak took a 5.4s lead back to service after the rally’s opening loop. By then, even the most optimistic had to admit the deal was done.
Before the start, Ogier had talked of his intention to fight with last year’s Rally Finland winner. The Frenchman, who has also tasted success in these parts, was adamant that he came for a scrap in his Citroen and, starting behind the Toyota, he would be giving him one. Friday lunchtime told a different tale.
“There is nothing we can do,” said Ogier, who was 12.6s behind and running sixth when he sat down to lunch. “He is unbelievable. I don’t know what happened with the weather – I think there was some rain and then in the last two weeks it was so hot and so dry – but the gravel seems more loose than ever. I never thought he could do what he did this morning.”
Tanak’s thinking was correct as the world came back at him through Friday afternoon. This being Finland, the margins were miniscule – when they weren’t nothing at all.
Like after the second shot at the Urria stage, when Jari-matti Latvala led, but Kris Meeke, Esapekka Lappi and Tanak had all taken 52m55.2s – six-tenths more than J-ML – to complete the first eight stages.
Latvala had eased his way clear to the comparative comfort of a 1.2-second advantage over Meeke by close of play on Friday. Citroen’s Lappi was the interloper who ensured any team orders Toyota might have been planning would have to be put on ice. At least for now.
As predictable as Tanak’s day one pace was, it was Saturday morning that his rivals really feared. Running further down the order after the classification was reversed for day two, Tanak went from fourth to first as he rocketed past the massed ranks of sausage eaters in Pihlajakoski.
And that, the commonly held view, was that. The #8 Toyota would not be headed from here until Sunday afternoon’s podium. But, still they couldn’t shake Lappi. Still, the resurgent C3 WRC star remained a thorn in the side of Toyota’s plans for podium domination.
With Lappi just a tenth of a second behind Meeke, the Brit responded with fastest time in Paijala to pile six-and-a-half seconds between his third-placed Yaris and the French machine. Ahead of Meeke, Latvala had moved into the lead by 0.2s from Tanak with KM just 0.4s further back. Ten seconds in Finland is generally reckoned to be worth 20 or 30 on other rallies. But what's six worth? Is six worth calling the boys off and reiterating team orders talked about on Thursday evening before the start of the rally? Much as Toyota wants to see Tanak champion, it wants a successful defence of its manufacturers' title and that means packing all three cars ahead of the nearest Hyundai. The podium lock-out would be the perfect scenario and, going into Kakaristo - the second half of the legendary Ouninpohja test-that was where the Finnish-based squad was. And had it not been for a rock on the outside of a fifth-gear right hander, it's quite possible that's how it would have stayed. Meeke first. He nailed the corner and dropped the left-rear into the ditch on the exit The ditch was where the rock resided. The impact folded the wheel back and against the arch immediately. The Northern Irish Yaris was parked up at the next available junction. Two minutes later and it was more of the same for the rock as Latvala's Yaris slappedit for a second time. The Finn escaped with a puncture.
Neither would escape the wrath of Makinen. “We had a good meeting before the rally,” he said. “We discussed things and we said:
‘Do not try to follow Ott. Do your own driving and concentrate on your own driving.’ But when they pull on the helmet and they get into the big fight, they forget everything.
“It was only a question of what happened. Both of them, they were thinking: Ott is going that fast… and they forget about their own driving. Somehow their concentration has been disturbed and, unfortunately, it’s not the first time this year. What can we do? How to tell them, again and again and again and trust that they remember that.”
Latvala got the message and, suitably chastened, throttled back and took a more conservative approach to the remainder of the rally. Fortunately for him, he’d ‘only’ dropped 14s with the puncture and so remained second, but with Lappi now just half a second behind.
Through all of this, Tanak was imperious. As his team-mates floundered on arguably Finland’s most famous stretch of gravel, he pressed on and pulled 8.1s out of everybody. Tanak said: “Stage by stage, my team-mates
started to push harder. In the third stage I was starting to push over the edge a little bit – this shows the pace was higher.”
Asked to explain “over the edge” Tanak grinned at the memory.
“It was Kakaristo,” he said. “That was the push. It wasn’t the crazy risk that you just close your eyes – no, I still kept the eyes open. I had a plan to stay on the road, but when you go over the edge a little it’s the places where you go flat and then the car is going light where you don’t expect or you jump and then you are landing a little bit off the line.”
Now, with a lead of 13.9s all bets really were off. Tanak wouldn’t be headed as he sought a perfect fivepointer on the powerstage.
Much as Tanak deserves the credit for an outstanding run and faultless three days, so does Lappi. The start to the season has been shocking for the likeable Citroen driver and, if ever the turnaround was coming, it had to come on his home event. Much as he was familiar with the terrain, having won with Toyota here two years ago, Lappi came to the event on the back of extremely good news from the technical department in Versailles.
Turns out the transmission set-up he’d been told would have to wait until next year had been found. The C3 could be transformed to his liking.
“I thought it couldn’t be for this year, I was told it’s not possible,” he said. “But then we found out these parts which were homologated already, but I guess it was so old parts they didn’t realise it would work. We tried and… boom.
“The car is more reactive. It’s something in the braking phase of the differential I get now.”
In layman’s terms, Lappi was struggling with the differential locking too much, which made it much harder for him to trail brake into corners without locking both front wheels. The improvements ensured only the inner wheel would slow, giving him the balance and confidence he’d found with the Toyota and Skoda.
And it came immediately. Crossing the finish line on the first gravel stage, he was just a tenth of a second off the fastest time in the Oittila 12-miler.
Lappi’s co-driver Janne Ferm said it all. He burst out laughing. And deservedly laughed the laugh of a man who hasn’t laughed like that for a long time.
Latvala was laughing less.
Going into the final morning, he was 12s down on Lappi, but didn’t dare suggest to Makinen that he pushed and tried to polish third into second. Especially not when Meeke crashed for the second time in the penultimate test.
All of those disappointments were forgotten – or at least put on the back burner – when Tanak flew across the finish line to secure back-to-back home wins and a hattrick for Makinen’s squad.
The bonhomie which reigned as the four-time champion hugged Tanak contrasted starkly with the reception when Tanak arrived in the service park following the powerstage in Sardinia. Remember that? When a steering problem turned first to fifth and left Tanak raging. There was an audible sigh of relief when a similar outcome was avoided seven Sundays on.
The result might have been the one the world expected, but Finland still delivered on a level only Finland can. The same can, and should, be said for Tanak.