Andreas Mikkelsen’s former World Rally Championship co-driver Ola Fløene believes the three-time World Rally winner would be a perfect fit for rally-raid should he decide to pursue a switch to the discipline in future.
Fløene partnered his fellow Norwegian for the first of Mikkelsen’s WRC victories in 2015 when the pair were team-mates at Volkswagen to Sébastien Ogier and Jari-Matti Latvala.
They twice went their separate ways, with Mikkelsen joining Anders Jæger and then Torstein Eriksson either side of a title winning WRC2 campaign partly with Fløene in 2021.
But Fløene, who contested his third Dakar in January 2022 – ironically with Mikkelsen after his regular Red Bull Off-Road Junior Team USA team-mate Mitch Guthrie tested positive for COVID-19 – believes that his former driver could have a successful career in rally-raid should WRC opportunities dry up.
“He is a curious person,” Fløene told DirtFish, “so, I think [rally-raid] is made for him.
“I was in Abu Dhabi with him two weeks ago, and he had a three-day test with proper navigation together with me, and Red Bull told him: ‘have a look at this sport’ and he was very interested.
“He is an open-minded person, and I would not be surprised if we see him [on the Dakar] again.
“The first stage we did on the Dakar last year, he was on the limiter and then we came to a waypoint, and he saw the lines in the sand, and he started to cut, but he didn’t know that he had to catch the waypoint!
“He was treating it like a WRC stage, but this is a discipline which is made for him, he likes this sort of thing, and he learns fast as well.”
Mikkelsen’s only Dakar experience to date didn’t quite go according to plan, after crashing on the third stage of the event.
“My boss from Red Bull called Andreas and Andreas jumped into the aircraft [immediately] which is so typical of him,” said Fløene.
“And he arrived early in the morning, so we had a morning meeting in the garage. I didn’t have my contact lenses in, and I looked at my team manager and I thought: ‘he looks a lot like Andreas!’
“I looked a second time and then a third time and finally I said: ‘what are you doing here!?’ and then he looked back at me and said he was driving with me.”
Now equipped with a new driver – albeit a tried and tested one – Fløene and Mikkelsen conducted a short test in the dunes before Mikkelsen stopped after spotting a camel on the stretch of road.
Once they got into the rally proper, Mikkelsen showed strong pace, but eventually crashed out after what Fløene describes as a “stupid thing”.
“It was a tire gauge that was measuring the wrong tire pressures and we were getting too many punctures,” Fløene explained.
“So, we were out of tires and then lost the concentration because we had a puncture and then flipped over, but he was so much faster than the others until then.”
Fløene is back on the Dakar Rally this year, alongside another former WRC driver Sheikh Khalid Al Qassimi in an X-raid prepared Mini John Cooper Works Buggy, as he looks to forge a new career in the discipline.
