M-Sport Ford driver Adrien Fourmaux has apologized for the crash that ruled him out of this week’s Ypres Rally in Belgium.
The 26-year-old went off the road on the first run at the Kemmelberg test on Friday. The accident, which registered 28g, damaged the car sufficiently that it would not return under re-entry regulations.
Fourmaux told DirtFish: “This is a big, big disappointment for me and also for the team and for my partners.
“I have most of my partners here and my family and they all paid for their own tickets to come to watch me. It’s worst because most of them were working [on Friday] and they wanted to come to watch on the weekend and now I’m not there anymore.”
The 26-year-old shouldered all of the blame for the shunt, which came when he was running seventh, 8.6s down on his sixth-placed Sébastien Ogier.
“There was two dirty lines in the corner,” he added. “I didn’t choose the right word [for my notes]. I had a word which was like ‘lines’ but really we needed only one word and that was ‘dirty’.
“We needed to be slower. It was a fast corner that tightened and I stayed flat. As well as that, the other drivers all put a small brake in there and I did not. I did two mistakes.”
Team principal Richard Millener said on Friday that he accepted the accident was part of a learning process for a driver on his fourth event in a World Rally Car.
