Ott Tänak made a victorious return to rallying at the Overmountain Rally in America on Saturday.
The penultimate round of the ARA National Championship was Tänak’s first competitive outing in a Toyota since the second place at Catalunya Rally which secured the 2019 World Rally Championship for him and co-driver Martin Järveoja.
Driving a GR Corolla Rally RC2, Tänak won the event by 1m04s over four-time American champion Brandon Semenuk. Making a one-off appearance in a Standard Motorsports Škoda Fabia RS Rally2, the Canadian was the only other driver to lead the event.
Tänak’s first public appearance for Toyota came in Italy in July, when he drove a GR Yaris Rally2 as a safety car on the Rally di Roma. Overmountain was his first competition since last year’s Rally Saudi Arabia, his final outing with the Hyundai team.
After taking a break through the first half of the year, Tänak joined Toyota to complete test work on its WRC27 car. He was happy to see the numbers back on the doors in Tennessee last week.
“It’s good to be competing again,” he told DirtFish. “In the beginning, it took a bit of time to get used to rallying again, it’s been a long time. I would say step-by-step we were finding a bit the rhythm. Generally, the roads were very technical, slow stages and yeah it was quite a big job, but we enjoyed [it] and in the end enjoyed and happy to come here and nice to win the rally. The Corolla was quite an easy car to drive and we had a good feeling through the two days.”
For the second ARA round in succession, Toyota’s superstar was cast into the initial shade by Semenuk.
After showing Jari-Matti Latvala the way through the first stage to lead Olympus Rally in April, the Canadian pinned his name to the top of the SS1 timesheets on Friday afternoon, beating Tänak by a tenth of a second. While he hit car trouble in Washington, Semenuk’s Škoda ran faultlessly through the event, allowing him to keep the 2019 world champion honest.
The only issue for Semenuk came on the event’s second loop, where the expected rain arrived fractionally too late for his Fabia’s tailored softer set-up. Saturday started bright with another stage win keeping him within touching distance of Tänak and easing him further clear of an increasingly distant chasing pack.
Conner Martell made his debut in the factory Subaru, with the team returning to the Open Class WRX instead of the L4WD class car the injured Travis Pastrana had been running. Martell headed the chasing packed and rarely looked troubled in third. Unfortunately for him a rock damaged a brake line on stage eight, leaving him with severely restricted ability to slow the Subaru. Roadside repairs delivered braking to the rear – via the handbrake – for the following stage and allowed him to get back to service, albeit 15 places further down the classification.
Seth Quintero secured Toyota a second double podium of the ARA season with third place – a result which keeps him in a title race still headed by Hyundai driver Lia Block.
After making ARA history as the youngest ever winner of a National round at the previous round in Ojibwe, fourth in Overmountain kept the 19-year-old at the top of the table ahead of the season’s LSPR finale in Michigan next month.
DirtFish Women in Motorsport driver Aoife Raftery was, once again, the class of the L4WD field. The Irishwoman was closing in on Ricardo Cordero’s Lancia Ypsilon Rally2 HF Integrale and a top-six place overall, when she was caught out on some loose on the outside of a sixth-stage corner. Her Ford Fiesta Rally3 slid wide and got stuck, forcing her and Hannah McKillop out.
