WRC 2010 kicks off in the swedish snow
It actually started yesterday with the Superspecial, but today was the first serious day of the Rally Sweden. We’ve been having a fun scrap for the lead with Hirvonen, Loeb and Sordo all within 10 seconds and all having led the rally, with the finn now in first place for Ford. I have to say I am mega impressed with Dani Sordo today, after all the talk that he wasn’t very good in this surface, don’t remember seeing him this strong for a while?
Other than the 3 leaders, there were several other points of interest. Jari-Matti Latvala won a stage but is lagging a bit further behind in 4th. Former world champions Marcus Gronholm and Petter Solberg have ran into trouble. Marcus had a mechanical problem that put him way way back, and had been a little off the pace before, anyway. Petter had a series of bizarre incidents in SS5, and ended up rear-ending Matthew Wilson’s stalled car after Matthew had passed him in-stage. Both continued, but Petter lost about 5 minutes.
Of course for Formula 1 fans, the big news was the presence of Kimi Raikkonen for the Citroen Junior Team. Kimi had been consistently putting times in-between the Fords of Wilson and al-Qassimi, at the back of the WRC field – but then he got stuck into a sand bank in SS6, losing 26 minutes to the leader and effectively ending any chance of a points score result. Strangely his most impressive time was immediately afterwards in SS7, when he was 9th quickest beating Wilson, P. Solberg and al-Qassimi. Kimi’s team-mate Sebastien Ogier has been doing a remarkably strong rally and is 5th placed overall.
Unlike in F1, you do have to get your hands dirty in this sport... keep your car on the road next time, Kimi.
Below the WRC class, P-G Andersson has been doing an amazing job with the Skoda Fabia S2000, annihilating all the other S2000s (he’s got a 1 minute lead over Tuohino) and even beating some WRC cars in some stages – he is looking good for becoming the first S-WRC rally winner, and gets my award for driver of the day. Madeira driver Bernardo Sousa is 5th out of 7 participants, which sounds a bit crap but keep in mind that this is a very exotic surface for someone coming from over here.
On the P-WRC, Patrik Flodin leads with a 20 second gap over Anders Grondal. The portuguese Armindo Araújo, reigning world champion, ran 3rd for a while but eventually had to settle for 4th at the end of the day behind Martin Semerad.
Classification after today, from Autosport:
Pos Driver Car Time/Gap
1. Mikko Hirvonen Ford 1h08m04.8s
2. Sebastien Loeb Citroen + 6.2s
3. Dani Sordo Citroen + 10.6s
4. Jari-Matti Latvala Ford + 31.7s
5. Sebastien Ogier Citroen + 1m10.9s
6. Henning Solberg Ford + 2m16.2s
7. Mads Ostberg Subaru + 3m20.2s
8. Matthew Wilson Ford + 3m21.1s
9. P-G Andersson Skoda + 4m16.1s
10. Janne Tuohino Ford + 5m15.3s
Keep in mind that the WRC has switched to the same points system as F1 and now the top 10 classified will get points. If it ends as it is right now, Andersson and Tuohino will score WRC points with S2000 cars…
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
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