Kimi crashes on the Arctic

Kimi’s first day competing with the Citroen C4 WRC didn’t go very smooth as he hit a snow bank in SS 2 and lost about half an hour as he got stuck in it. The cause of the crash was that he misheard a pace note, as he admitted. The car looked quite bent, but he was still able to continue and do all the other stages of the day in the Arctic Lapland Rally.

That's not the way a Citroen C4 WRC is supposed to look like

I was quite impressed by his pace, however. He seems to be losing about 1 second per kilometer or a little less to Dani Sordo. It is worth remembering, though, that Dani is not awesome on snow, and hasn’t been here in the Arctic before.

I found the following vid on Youtube, a 2 minutes highlight by finnish TV station MTV3 of Kimi’s performance today. You can see some entertaining shots of his driving, an onboard camera in another competitor’s car showing Kimi’s car stuck on the snowbank, and an interview with his co-driver Kaj Lindstrom – that is, if you understand finnish, of course.

By the way I wrote something wrong yesterday, as it seems there’s more than just Group N cars and S2000s as competition to the Citroens, apparently there’s 2 or 3 WRC cars that are a couple years old, too. Still Dani and Kimi have been dominating the event as expected, although with the 30 minutes lost Kimi is now way, way down the order.

Arctic Rally starts tomorrow

As a Kimi Raikkonen fan, I couldn’t let this one pass without talking about it. Tomorrow starts the Arctic Lapland Rally in Finland, and Kimi will be there racing the Citroen C4 WRC competitively for the first time. This doesn’t really count for anything – it’s just a national Finnish Rally Championship round – other than for gaining experience, but still it will be interesting to see how he does against the main Citroen team works driver Dani Sordo, who also will be there to train his mediocre snow driving skills (mediocre for world class standards, and compared to how well he goes on the other surfaces…).  The 2 are expected to dominate the event, with the closest competition coming from 3 S2000 cars, one of them driven by Kimi’s brother Rami, and a long list of Mitsubishis and Subarus, all of which from a slower class.

Kimi Raikkonen on the shakedown for the Arctic Rally