Four-time American champion Brandon Semenuk will make his European Rally Championship debut at this week’s Royal Rally of Scandinavia.
Driving the same SRT-run Škoda Fabia RS Rally2 he will use in Karlstad, the Canadian came within 3.9 seconds of winning last weekend’s Swedish loosener, Rally Nyköping.
“Nyköping was all about the test,” Semenuk told DirtFish. “It was really important to get back with SRT and back in the car ahead of the ERC event. It was really useful.”
Leading the event going into the final stage, Semenuk and his British co-driver Keaton Williams took a compromised tire choice in an effort to understand more about the car-tire package on the fast Scandinavian gravel.
“Obviously it would have been nice to win the rally,” he added, “but at the end of the day, the result’s not going to make a huge difference for me. The most important thing for me right now is seat time and experience of the car. From what I can understand, that last stage is the one most similar to what we’re going to see in Karlstad this week, so it was more important for me to gain more data, more understanding of what we’ve got under us.
“The event started wet and then dried out, so it gave us a good opportunity to drive the car in different conditions.”
Semenuk was leading at the weekend but sacrificed a result in pursuit of learning
Last weekend was just Semenuk’s fourth start outside of North America and only his first full event in nine months.
“My day-to-day is mountain biking,” said Semenuk. “I feel what I’m doing is not so bad for a mountain biker, but I want to feel like a rally driver again.”
Semenuk departed Subaru and turned his back on a tilt at a fifth ARA National Championship title in search of more experience and the opportunity to demonstrate his pace on the international stage. The combination of budget issues and a busy bike schedule have kept him from competing as much as he would have liked so far this year, but he’s hoping back-to-back Swedish outings will get his program back on track.
“We did the Olympus,” he said, “and we were able to lead the event and beat Jari-Matti [Latvala] in the first stage, but then that whole thing went south and we ran into a bunch of mechanical problems. That was tough.
“Putting Olympus to one side, before last weekend, we hadn’t been in a rally car since August last year. I’m trying to build my pace and show what we’re can do, but it’s not easy when you’re not in the car as often as you would like to be. When I was with Subaru, we were in the car a fair bit and I could just get in it, listen to the notes and drive it close to the limit. I’m still so new to Rally2 cars, there are these little hesitations where I’m just trying to understand the car completely before I fully commit. We’re close and we’ll take another step this weekend.
“It’s kind of nice that we’re in Sweden for this whole week – Keaton and I get to have a little bit of downtime before we start in Karlstad. We’re going into the event fresh, with some good seat time and a really good feeling with the car and the team.
“In terms of the result, this is another one where I’m going to race myself – focus on my own event and see where we sit.”
As well as being the only driver to beat Latvala on a stage in Washington, Semenuk ran former Rally Finland winner Esapekka Lappi a close second at last year’s OK Auto-Ralli in Kouvola.
“I still don’t really know where the pace is,” he said. “We really need run of a few rallies to see where we fit in. Hopefully we can make that happen.”
Much as the focus is on being a rally driver this week, bikes are never far from Semenuk’s mind, as today’s release of RGB <LINK> demonstrates.
“Like I said it’s been a busy start to the year with the bike stuff,” he said. “But I’m really happy with how RGB has come together.”
Royal Rally of Scandinavia starts from Karlstad with a superspecial on Friday evening, before two full days in the Värmland forests. Rally Portugal’s WRC2 winner Teemu Suninen heads a quality entry for the second ERC round of the season.
