Hyundai’s Thierry Neuville was fastest on Thursday morning’s shakedown for Rally Sweden, the second round of the World Rally Championship season.
With the crews looking forward to experiencing “perfect” conditions of snow and ice on the WRC’s only winter rally, Neuville took a late fourth run that was a full 1.4 seconds faster than M-sport part-timer Mārtiņš Sesks through the two-mile stage.
With Neuville’s team-mate Ott Tanak third fastest, another 0.2s back, despite only taking two runs, it was a highly promising start for the update i20 N which makes its debut on the event.
But world champion Neuville admitted that little could be read into times on the city-based shakedown stage. Next to a river, slightly higher temperatures make its ice base less firm.
“It’s not so representative for what will be the rally we like,” he said, “but it’s good to get at least the feeling a bit again with the car and the tires. The grip was much higher than expected, to be honest. Not sure it will be like this in the stages, but we’re going to find out.”
On his first appearance of a limited 2025 program in the Ford Puma Rally1, Sesks was keen to soften expectations for an event he has contested only twice before, and never in four-wheel-drive machinery. He said: “We will take it step by step and we’ll see how it goes.”
Sesks impressed with second fastest time on his first event of the season
Like Neuville, Tänak was coy about the updated i20 N, which is expected to improve high-speed performance. “We need to hope it [the update] works,” he smiled. “Obviously the ice is breaking up quite quickly [here] but it’s still a lot of fun.”
Best of the Toyota GR Yaris Rally1s was Elfyn Evans, 2.2s off the pace. As the de facto championship leader, in the absence of Monte Carlo winner Sébastien Ogier, Evans will open the road on the event’s opening leg.
“Let’s see how that goes,” he said. “Obviously we know what it means historically but maybe this year the conditions favor us a bit. It’s a bit more of an ice base so the penalty of running first should be less but of course we have to wait and see how it plays out.”
The third Hyundai of Adrien Fourmaux matched Evans’s time. “It was really great memories from last year, my first podium in the Rally1 class,” he said. “Now I’m with a different team but really enjoying this rally and it’s always such a special feeling to drive on snow. So I want to do the same, for sure.”
Evans’s team-mate Kalle Rovanperä was only sixth fastest, another 0.6s back. The two-time world champion was looking forward to the action getting under way for real. He said: “Normally it’s a really cool rally. This year the conditions on the stages looks really nice so I’m sure we are going to enjoy it a lot.”
Seventh was M-Sport’s Josh McErlean, just 0.1s further back after making significant gains on his four runs. He was 2s quicker than more experienced team-mate Grégoire Munster who was 10th fastest overall.
The M-Sport pair sandwiched Toyota drivers Sami Pajari and Takamoto Katsuta. The Yaris duo, both known for speed on snow, were 3.4s and 3.8s off the ultimate pace but looking forward to the rally proper.
“It’s something that I’m quite used to, like back in the days in Finland in national championships,” said Pajari. “And of course, it’s a rally where it’s all about the pure performance and not taking care of the tires, or the car normally too much, so basically you can just enjoy these cars properly what they can do, so it’s just a really cool feeling.”
The Rally2 field was headed by local drivers Pontus Tidemand (Škoda) and Oliver Solberg (Toyota), until Romet Jürgenson (Ford Fiesta) split them late on – the three separated by intervals of 0.3s. Fabrizio Zaldivar’s Škoda was another 0.2s back, 0.8s ahead of the Toyota of 18-year-old Arctic Rally winner Tuukka Kauppinen.
