GRX driver Niclas Grönholm believes there is still ‘a lot of work’ to be done to his car ahead of the second RallyX Nordic round of the season at the Magic Weekend after finishing third in the first Supercar final of the year.
Grönholm had dominated proceedings at Höljes in his 2020-spec Hyundai i20, winning all three qualifying heats and his semi-final to secure pole position for the final.
But a poor start, caused by a slow reaction to the green light, allowed JC Raceteknik’s Robin Larsson to leapfrog the Finn into the first corner, with the Swede taking the victory.
Grönholm also lost out to double World Rallycross Champion Johan Kristoffersson with his joker strategy and ended up finishing third.
Speaking after the race, Grönholm said he was ‘not too happy’ with his third-place finish.
“Of course, after a day like this, winning everything except for practise, you expect to also come out with the win in the final, but I messed it up,” said Grönholm.
“I was late on the start light but that was all that was needed for Robin to beat me to the first corner.
“I felt that I was ready, but I haven’t had good reactions this weekend, the semi-final was really good, so maybe I need to work on that in the future.”
GRX had spent much of the day testing different set-ups on the i20, and Grönholm admitted that the performance was peaking and troughing as his family team experimented.
“We’ve been going forward and backwards [with the car] trying different stuff but I feel that we still have a lot of work [to do], I feel we should have been more competitive, and we need to dig into it. We will try new things on Saturday.
“I don’t know if it is [quicker], I feel like we should be going quicker. We’re not doing as good lap times as we were last year, so I don’t know what pace we should be doing. But I feel we should improve.”
With Friday a media-only day at the ‘All-Star’ Magic Weekend, Grönholm says that improvements will need to be made if he is to taste victory in the second round of the season on Sunday.
“We need to sit down with the team and figure out what we did wrong and what we did good and try new things. We’re learning all the time.”
