“Turkey keeps tyre engineers awake at night”
The return of the mousse. Good thing? I’m not so sure. Tommi Makinen is a man who knows an awful lot more than me about most things and the use of mousse tyres is right up there with winning World Rally Championships.
And I can see his point. For the second year in succession, the mountains above Marmaris were littered with bits of broken tyre, while drivers returned to service with tales of woe and what might have been.
Firstly, it’s important to point out that this is beyond the control of Michelin or Pirelli. Having driven both the Cetibeli and Yesilbelde stages, the tyre firm’s frustrations are understandable. The size of the rocks have to be seen to be believed. Suffice to say they laughed in the face of MN’S hire car and the tiredlooking 205mm-wide Bridgestones it wore at each corner.
Unwilling to risk a puncture – more pertinently, unwilling to risk having to get out and change a puncture in brogues, chinos and 36 degrees – progress was slow. Slow to the point of stopping and seriously considering a way out half-way through Friday morning’s 23-miler. It was that bad. Actually, it was worse.
I made it, but must apologise to the hire car firm
(the name escapes me…) for tattooing the car’s underside with a reflection of the road’s topography. Asphalt has never been so welcome. Ever.
My sincere understanding of his plight did little to improve the mood of Kalle Rovanpera, who suffered two punctures in there. He cared little that I felt some of his pain.
Had you offered Kalle or I mousse in the middle of Cetibeli, we would both have been deeply grateful.
But watching the cars progress through the second running of the stage (where Ott Tanak suffered his puncture) and before the heaviest of the potentially game-changing rain arrived, I started to think maybe mousse wasn’t the answer.
Yes, Mexico and Sardinia are rough rallies. Australia and Portugal can have their moments too. But Turkey’s something different. Turkey’s back to the toughest times, back to the Greek roads which kept tyre engineers awake at night – the likes of Karroutes or Bauxite Way.
When mousse arrived, it changed the nature of the Acropolis Rally. Granted, you couldn’t run across absolutely everything, but the concept of slowing to an absolute stop was saved only for the most mental of Safari washaways. The spectacle of these cars going flat-chat over those monstrous rocks is interesting, but wouldn’t that just transfer the shock into the suspension, which would then need significant investment to beef it up for the job?
No, I think we’re better off without mousse. I like the idea of drivers really having to use their head and calculate what they can and can’t get away with. For one event only, it’s good to give the left foot something to do – especially coming from the previous gravel rally in Finland, where the result is decided largely by the weight of the right foot and the dimensions of what sits between left and right legs.
That’s brawn. This was brain. Both have a place.