There is no reason to jump in the air with joy, but, obviously, this is the best feeling I have had since starting my new career in WRC. We got a nice ten points from the Turkish weekend. The whole team was very happy with the job we managed to do. Well, once again we proved that our simple target - finish, finish, finish – suits us fine. When we managed to finish the rally, we are also able to get a good result.
In some stages it was mainly the question to go very cautiously. Especially in the last stage it was very tricky to find the right speed. It was slippery like on ice. I pushed and Kaj did the braking on me. Once again it was working well and we kept the car on the road until the very finish. Fifth place in the Turkish Rally was more than we could have hoped before going for it.
It was a difficult rally, as I said. Even the big boys made mistakes. Mikko Hirvonen hit the stone, while he started to push harder and some top guys had even more costly errors.
Obviously, the TOP-5 are in a league of their own. But we were the best in the second division. I was the center forward of the second line-up, if you want to describe it with ice hockey terms.
It’s no use to make a big deal of it. I just enjoy this moment. The next rally will be totally different and a new challenge for us all.
The Turkish Rally is absolutely the best rally I’ve done during my short WRC career. No doubt about it.
It was a new place for every driver. Nobody knew the roads before and as a WRC rookie, I’ve got a certain advantage in comparison to the top guys, while none of them hadn’t done the roads 5-10 times before.
Now there is no need to think of, what is the gap to the top we have, while going to a place where nobody has raced before. That’s something we know better after the this weekend and that gives us more confidence going to other new places – like Bulgaria on July.
All the time I have better feeling also with the car. It’s getting better and better every time and it feels also easier to drive. This time we had some stages on tarmac, too. Well, it was still early days to try to get used to the grip levels and we used the gravel tyres and gravel set-up, too. So it’s useless to get too involved in details at this stage.
Now we have a break, because I’m not going to New Zealand. But it’s not a holiday time. I have some work to do. Hopefully we get the cars back to the factory as soon as possible. I’ll be starting to focus on my next rally in Portugal with some testing before.
Source: KIMIRAIKKONEN.COM
