Kalle Rovanperä has done zero preparation for this week’s Rally Poland. He’s had no test and a disrupted recce. Can he win? Rival team principal Richard Millener says he can.
The M-Sport team principal has seen this kind of approach before, albeit not to quite such an extreme level. When Elfyn Evans won his first world championship event in a Ford Fiesta WRC in 2017 he did so with no test and limited preparation.
Millener told DirtFish: “Sometimes the ones with the least preparation can end up with the best results because maybe they’re just are a little bit more relaxed about the whole thing. Kalle wasn’t expecting to come here, [so] he’s not been thinking about it – he’s going to come in super-fresh.
“Yeah, he’s maybe had a difficult recce schedule, but he’s at a professional-enough level where I don’t believe that will make a huge difference to him. He’s incredibly fast on this kind of surface, he’ll end up with a reasonable road position and I think, yeah, sometimes throwing these people in at the last minute can actually work quite well.
“Maybe, sometimes, it’s easy to forget just how good Kalle is when we’re not seeing him on every rally – he could really come to the party this weekend and show what he’s capable of on these roads. He could definitely be a force to be reckoned with and, yeah, I think he can still win.”
Rovanperä’s not so sure. The Finn told DirtFish more about leaving his jet-ski lakeside and flying in last-minute to stand in for Sébastien Ogier, following the Frenchman’s recce crash.
“To be honest,” he said, “I didn’t have much choice. Of course, I could have said no, but yeah, I understood the team really needed the help. So yeah, like I said, I wasn’t really super-happy to come to a fast rally like this without any preparation.
“I know it’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be even so enjoyable. But yeah, I said yes because I wanted to help the team.”
Rovanperä admitted fast gravel is his thing, but the lack of preparation remains a concern.
Prepared or unprepared, Rovanperä still found some pace at Thursday morning’s shakedown
“Of course, I like these kind of rallies and the pace should be good, but I also need to be realistic and say without really learning the stages like everybody else… I’m sure everybody tries to learn these fast stages from videos – I haven’t watched them. Realistically, it’s not easy. We will hopefully start step-by- step and let’s see if we can get up to speed.”
He added that his co-driver Jonne Halttunen was also slightly more stressed than normal. Halttunen was mid-tattoo when he got the call.
Rovanperä added: “We are both now happy to be here and helping the team, but it’s not so nice when you know that you will not catch up any time with the others. You will be a bit behind all the time. Jonne also needs to work a lot – he’s not sleeping so much during the night, writing all the notes and everything. So, yeah, it will be tricky.”
Check back in at DirtFish on Sunday for the definitive answer to this one.
Halttunen made a swift exit from a Tallinn tattoo parlour to make the private plane to Poland on Tuesday
