Jon Armstrong has talked DirtFish through his Rally Portugal accident 600 meters onto Saturday afternoon’s first stage.
The M-Sport driver had been 10th overall, fighting back into the points on Saturday morning after losing his power steering on Friday afternoon.
But he rolled on SS15 of 23, nudging a bank with the rear of his Puma Rally1 which tipped it into a roll.
“I really enjoyed the first pass of the stage, so I was trying to keep a good rhythm and see what we could do on the second pass,” Armstrong told DirtFish, “but maybe slightly underestimated the grip levels from basically the weather change, but also the slower cars that have gone through, the tracks are a bit loose.
“So when we came through this left into right over a small crest, just the rear stepped out quite quickly and then touched the bank and put the car into a roll on the road. So yeah, really frustrated to obviously go out like this. And yeah, it’s pretty tricky in these conditions, but hadn’t really done a proper afternoon loop in the rally yet.
“So yeah, we just got caught out basically, not really expecting that level of low grip.”
Armstrong misjudged the changing grip and paid the price
Armstrong and co-driver Shane Bryne are both OK, but the 31-year-old isn’t sure if he will be able to restart on Sunday.
“I think the cage and everything is OK, it’s just that the panels on the Rally1s fall off quite easy, so it doesn’t look great,” he explained.
“But yeah, hopefully the guys and girls at M-Sport can put it back together. I don’t know if that’ll be tomorrow or… obviously, Japan we’ll hope to be back out. But yeah, let’s see if we can fix it for tomorrow. I think it’s a big job, but I’m sure it’s possible.”
Armstrong has impressed many throughout his rookie Rally1 season so far, but Rally Islas Canarias and now Portugal have been difficult events for him.
“You don’t want to be making mistakes, that’s for sure,” he admitted. “And we’ve not really had a lot of clean runs so far this year. So yeah, it’s difficult because if you want to keep it neat and tidy, then you’re not going to be close to the front. So, yeah, it’s always a balancing act between that.
“I guess now we know some of the limitations so we can learn from that and maybe learn something setup wise, what we can do to sort of have more grip in these scenarios. But yeah it’s still my fault that I didn’t realize that it was going to be as tricky as what it was.
“We just have to try and learn as much as possible from that, have a debrief with the team. I’s not good to crash one of these cars so yeah we’ll try to pick ourselves up. And going to Japan you still have to have confidence too so we just have to get our head back into it.”
