M-Sport faces a four-day race against time to rebuild Mārtiņš Sesks’ Ford Puma Rally1 ahead of Acropolis Rally Greece at the end of the month.
The Latvian crashed out of this week’s Rally Italy Sardinia, rolling the car on what was a chaotic second stage of the Olbia-based event. M-Sport confirmed later in the day that Sesks would not be restarting due to the significant damage caused by the crash.
Team principal Richard Millener explained the task facing the team in the next fortnight.
“The next event is just over two weeks away,” he told DirtFish. “We’ve got only four days back in the UK to repair the same chassis. If we’d been able to run him tomorrow, we would have put a hell of a lot of panels on it – carbon panels that we would probably have had to bodge a bit, only to get it back to the UK to take them all off again and put more new ones on.”
M-Sport has, in the past, sent cars home early from rallies in an effort to get work underway in the Donveby Hall factory. That’s not the case this time.
“It’s very difficult to gain that much,” said Millener, “because you’ve still got to remember we’ve still got cars here on the rally, we need people here. We could take a car back tomorrow, we could fly it back, but there’ll be no one there. They’re all here.
“We’ll strip it here. Do as much work as we can here. We’ve got two days with plenty of time. We’re all committed to working a weekend. We work those days. We’ll clean it, strip it, get it prepped and do the bits we need to do back at Dovenby.
“That gives us a bit of a head start – but it’s still quite a mission to get back to Cumbria, fix it, then turn it around and get it out to Greece. We were already very tight on time, but sometimes rallying throws these challenges at you. I know the team’s been there before, we’ll be there again. We always get back up, keep going and that’s exactly what we’ll do again.”
M-Sport has rarely had a busier Friday, with Josh McErlean and Grégoire Munster retiring with impact damage in the same stage as Sesks, while Jourdan Serderidis rolled the squad’s fourth Puma on the second pass of that 11-mile run from Telti to Berchidda.
Serderidis completed the day in his damaged car and McErlean and Munster will both restart on Saturday morning.
