Rally Italia-Sardegna / Round-up
Round-up
M-Sport
Team boss Malcolm
Wilson got a heavy
financial blow on the
Italian Island when
Mikko Hirvonen’s Fiesta
for no apparent reason
went ablaze in the early
stages of the rally. Wilson agreed. Even with
a very heavy crash you
can sill salvage quite a
of parts that you can reuse. But with a fire like
this everything is damaged beyond repair. We
Jipocar Czech National Team
take back the wreckage
to Britain, but that is to
find out what caused
this fire. But even that
will probably be very
hard as all the tell tale
signs have been burnt
too. A small consolation
for the team was the
improvement of Elfyn
Evans’s sixth place
in Last year’s rally. A
solid and sensible drive
earned him a well-deserved fifth place.
28/44
Volkswagen Motorsport
Henning Solberg
scratched together
some budget and
found himself at the
start without any prior
tests. “I can test during shakedown,” he
smiled. The everoptimistic Norwegian
ended 7th we hope
this will be enough to
convince his benefactors they made the
good choice to support
him.
Ogier was sulking
loudly about starting positions and of
course Ogier was
handicapped by his
road position. However teammate Latvala was just behind
him on the first day
so the loose gravel
slowed him too. Still
Latvala managed to
stay in front of his
most important rival
on the road to fulfill his
championship aspirations. Luckily for Ogier
however, the cool approach he managed to
keep for a fairly long
time was assaulted by
Ogier’s perseverance.
Although the Finn was
able to stay ahead, he
felt the pressure. At
the end of Saturday
this resulted in a momentary loss of concentration. The result
was a broken wheel
that had to be fixed on
the stage. Both he and
co-driver Anttila managed to do this very
Martin Prokop fully used his good road
position in the beginning of the rally
and found himself in third place overall.
Though the advantage of road position
changed the following days he persisted
in driving good times and ended up in
sixth place.
quickly but it still cost
them some two minutes and the lead and
finally, quite possibly,
victory in the rally. The
championship battle
still continues but Ogier managed to widen
the gap again.
new co-driver Ola
Fløene. It seemed
they quickly found
back their rhythm as,
like in the last two
rally’s the Norwegian
was fighting for third/
fourth place again.
Unfortunately a broken damper stopped
Volkswagen
him and his fellow
Motorsport II
countryman Østberg
could relax a bit. Still
For Andreas Mikkels- there was some saten Sardinia was all
isfaction for the team
about the reunion with in winning the Powerhis former and now
Stage.