He’s done it again. Kalle Rovanperä leads a gravel round of the World Rally Championship overnight, despite starting the leg as the first car on the road.
We should stop being surprised, shouldn’t we? There’s an air of inevitability about it that is threatening to make it almost unimpressive. But impressive, it very much is.
For all of Rovanperä’s 2022 supremacy though, his Friday performance in Estonia wasn’t the most commanding. Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans bossed the morning, winning all four stages and continuing that streak with a scratch time on the first test of the afternoon.
However, when the weather turned and the promised rain began to fall, Rovanperä was brought back into play. With better grip than his rival, he was able to take small chunks out of Evans over the next two stages before the contest swung dramatically on the leg’s final speed run.
Rovanperä completed the stage four cars ahead and consequently 12 minutes before Evans, meaning he had the better conditions as the road worsened in the falling rain, allowing him to convert a 10.9-second disadvantage into an 11.7s advantage.
Fortunate? Undoubtedly, but this was totally out of Rovanperä’s control. What was within Rovanperä’s control – and could very well have cost him the lead – was a moment earlier in the day on the very first stage, before the weather decided to wreak havoc.
Peipisääre was where Rovanperä had laid it all on the line 12 months earlier in a fight for victory with then Hyundai driver Craig Breen.
After Friday’s action, Rovanperä led Breen by just 8.5s and so the battle royale was expected to continue on the second day.
But Rovanperä had other ideas, blitzing his rival by 14.3s to effectively end the contest there and then. He would of course go on to claim his first ever WRC victory.
So of all the pieces of road where it could go wrong, you’d have got long odds for predicting it was this 15-mile stretch that almost proved Rovanperä’s undoing.
Rally drivers have a habit of playing moments down, so when Rovanperä reached the end of the stage and freely admitted “we were lucky, we hit a rock quite hard,” then it was clear this was quite the impact.
A look at the onboard confirms Rovanperä isn’t fibbing – he really was lucky to get away with it.
The first 8m40s of the stage is the sort of lesson in flat-out precision driving that you’d expect of somebody with such talent and in such a rich vein of form.
It’s a breathtaking watch as Rovanperä dances the car between the crests and through the cambered high-speed turns.
But through the trees, approaching a deceptively tight left-hand bend, Rovanperä checks up and hits the brakes, the Yaris beginning to squirm as the tires bite into the surface.
The first sign that things are about to go wrong comes quite late, when Rovanperä has swung the car round the corner. From there, it’s clear he’s going a little bit too quickly to make it round without going off the road.
Check this screenshot here as ultimate proof. Rarely will you see Rovanperä look stressed behind the wheel of a rally car, but his eyes are on stalks. He knows he’s going to have to rely on his cat-like reactions to steer him out of trouble.
The car continues to slide towards the edge of the corner, and Rovanperä has already clocked what’s coming. Rocks. Two of them, to be precise, are sat there waiting for him – almost perfectly placed as if the rally gods are out to punish Rovanperä for his brilliant start to the season.
Sure enough, contact is made. A shift in tone from Jonne Halttunen confirms it, as does the loud thud as Rovanperä fights to wrestle the car back the right way as it’s kicked towards the edge of the road through the force.
Rovanperä barely flinches. Aside from the change in octave, nor does Halttunen. Banging the car down from fourth to third gear, Rovanperä recovers impeccably and continues on his way to the third-fastest time.
“Yeah there was one narrow place which I knew really well, the notes were correct but I just went a bit too fast in and on the outside, there was a rock that we hit,” he told DirtFish later.
“It was lucky that we hit it on the rim and not to have a puncture.”
How fast was he going?
“Not really high speed but medium speed, proper speed going into the corner so that was good that we made that.”
Indeed it was. The size of the rocks, and the nature of the impact, meant on another day, in another year, Rovanperä may well have punctured – or potentially even worse.
But they say winners make their own luck, don’t they?
Thanks for pointing it out though, Kalle. We likely never would have known just how close you came to disaster today without your honesty.
