“It’s been an interesting second day of Rallye de France but not an easy one. In the end we so nearly managed to get to the end of all the stages, which was great, but we were off on two occasions, which wasn’t. Tomorrow we will start the final day thanks to SupeRally, but it’s obviously not the same. All the motivation goes, so it becomes a lot more like testing than competing.
“Myself and Kimi started the day in seventh, which is not bad at all under the circumstances. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an asphalt rally with conditions like the ones we had yesterday: it was more like a battlefield than an asphalt stage! There was mud everywhere and the grip was somewhere between zero and less than zero.
“That was the same problem we had today as well: it was impossible to build up proper confidence and halfway through the second stage of the day we just went skating off on the mud, on a corner that was probably taken at about 20 kph.
“There have been so many spectators on this rally, but when you need them around they are never there: we were on our own apart from maybe 10 people or so. Eventually we managed to get the car back onto the road, but half an hour was gone and any chance of getting a good result.
“Then we had another problem on the penultimate stage: the car went wide and we got stuck on the outside of a corner, which was obviously quite dangerous. We had to get out of the car in case anybody else hit us, and unfortunately that was our work done for the day.
“With a clean run, I think that we could have been near the top six in the end, which would have been a great result for only Kimi’s third world championship rally on asphalt.
“Generally speaking, I think he’s made a lot of progress over the last few months, particularly when it comes to the pace notes. Finland was an important turning point, and since then things have been getting better and better. We’ve maybe not had the concrete results to show for it, but the potential has been definitely there. Up to the point where we slipped off, which was just a stupid little thing, we had been completely consistent and mistake-free too: in fact we set seventh-fastest time on every single stage yesterday!
“It’s not easy starting a whole new learning campaign like this when you’re a former F1 champion, but Kimi is really working hard and he’s always ready to take new ideas on board.
“I see quite a few things in common between him and Tommi Makinen, whom I used to co-drive for: they’re both determined, they’ve both got a great sense of humour, and they’re both bloody fast…”
Source: MaxRally
Courtesy: Julia
