This week more than perhaps any other, the winner of the latest round of the World Rally Championship is being decided today. And yesterday. That’s Tuesday and Wednesday, by the way.
The recce is a vital part of any event, but for Hyundai star Esapekka Lappi, it’s even more important this time. He’s spent two days driving his recce car through the bushes in an effort to find the line that can win him a second here or a tenth there.
“Road usage [in Estonia] is not so clear,” explained the Finn. “You can cut from the bushes and use the exits [to run wide] if there is a field. To be able to comfortably go outside of the road you have to have perfect pace notes at that speed. That is the trickiest thing to get right.”
And the man Lappi’s been talking to for the past two days, his co-driver Janne Ferm, agrees. Estonia, according to him, is not one of the most complex events from the right-hand seat of the Hyundai i20 N Rally1. But the devil is very much buried in the detail.
Ferm said: “Rally Estonia is not a very difficult rally, especially if you come from Finland where you are used to crests and jumps.
“From the co-driver’s point-of-view, there are long straights with a few sections that are busy, but they tend to come one corner after another. The wide roads are quite simple in places compared to Sardinia and Portugal.
“The challenge in Estonia is finding where you can cut or go wide and that’s basically what the co-drivers and drivers will do during the recce. The main differences between Estonia and other rallies are that it is very high speed and some of the jumps are man-made.”
In terms of approach, Lappi added: “As everyone knows, in terms of speed this event is similar to Finland and Chile. The driving style is you are either full throttle or braking – there is no in-between. Normally in central European rallies, you need to drive a different way, but in Estonia and Finland you are full throttle and that is the biggest difference.”
