{"id":6977,"date":"2008-06-01T12:27:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-01T09:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/?p=6977"},"modified":"2025-12-03T12:48:45","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T10:48:45","slug":"acropolis-rally-of-greece-29-may-1-june-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/acropolis-rally-of-greece-29-may-1-june-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Acropolis Rally of Greece 29 May \u2013 1 June 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The ceremonial start of the rally was again after five years at the foot of Mount Acropolis where I arrived being a bit thoughtful because I had driven off the road in the shake down and my car\u2019s right side was slightly damaged. The mechanics fixed the car in half an hour, though, but still I was a bit annoyed. The race hadn\u2019t even started properly and I had already been somewhat careless. On Friday morning when the race really started I had put my Thursday\u2019s thoughts aside and was ready to push. The first three stages of the rally I drove fast but not flat out yet and I was leading Sebastien Loeb by 4.2 seconds before the first service. Friday afternoon didn\u2019t go as well because the tyre slipped out of the rim and I had to drive about four kilometers with an empty front tyre losing some ten seconds. On stage six in the final corner where I had to brake the rear tyre hit a rock jutting out from the bedrock. This broke my rear suspension as it did for my team-mates Mikko Hirvonen and Khalid Al Quassimi, too. My co-driver and I managed to strap the suspension up so that we were able to drive the road section to the next super special which luckily was the last stage of the day. It was painful to drive the super special with a damaged suspension \u2013 we were one minute ten seconds slower than the fastest driver. After Friday we were sixth in the rally one minute nineteen seconds behind Sebastien Loeb who was leading. On Saturday I started to push hard and we managed to be the second fastest car on each of the morning stages (stages 8 \u2013 10) which now put us to the fourth position only 1.5 seconds behind Petter Solberg. Unfortunately Lady Luck turned her back on us again. In the start of stage 11 the turbo got damaged and I had to drive about 58 seconds with no boost pressure and lost over eight minutes. I was eighth in the rally after Saturday. On Sunday my plan was to drive good stage times and had a day of no problems whatsoever. All the six stages of the day went well and I even managed to drive three fastest times. That and because Henning Solberg had some technical problems took me to the seventh position. This was an extremely difficult race due to the worst roads ever \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The ceremonial start of the rally was again after five years at the foot of Mount Acropolis where I arrived being a bit thoughtful because I had driven off the road in the shake down and my car\u2019s right side was slightly damaged. The mechanics fixed the car in half an hour, though, but still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7014,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2008-en","category-rally-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7018,"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6977\/revisions\/7018"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latvalamotorsport.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}