This race was located at the neighborhood of my co-driver Juho Hänninen, and Juho had talked me into it. We drove a Ralli2 class GR Yaris.
Already in the tests, we encountered difficult weather conditions, slush and melting snow. During the tests, the car went out of control a couple of times. First, we drove nose first into a tree when the car left off the road and I turned off the engine by braking too hard. After that, maintenance worked for 5 and a half hours so that we could continue the tests. However, I didn’t have time to test much when I drove through a junction and into a snow bank. One of the worst test days, if not the worst I’ve ever driven. Continuing from the test to the competition was hard because my spirit was quite low. I really had to think about how we could improve or even perform in general.
In the first stage, we had problems with the turbo hose. The turbo hose came off as a result of the test run. Because of the problem, we lost 46 seconds, but during road section we got the car back in shape and were able to continue the race.
I wasn’t sure if anything would come of the race, but suddenly the weather was so difficult that things really started to happen in the race and our results suddenly started to rise. And when I was the fastest of the last two stages, we finally came second in the overall competition. The feeling was absolutely amazing and this result gave me new energy, especially after such a bad test day.
Co-driver: Juho Hänninen
Car: Toyota GR Yaris Rally2
Service team: JML-WRT Oy
