Elfyn Evans says his past experience of Rally Estonia will give him a head start as the World Rally Championship restarts in Tartu this Friday.
The Toyota driver ran second but finished fourth while driving an M-Sport Ford Fiesta WRC at last year’s Rally Estonia. And that result came despite having injured his back after a wrong line led to a heavy landing from a jump on the WRC Promotional event.
Evans returned to Estonia for last month’s South Estonia Rallu, but crashed his Yaris WRC heavily on the first afternoon test.
Despite those two problems, Evans is looking forward to this week’s WRC round. Talking to DirtFish after the recce for the Tartu-based event, Evans said: “It’s looking like a really nice event again. It’s obviously very fast in the most part and there are some challenging sections, including some narrow places in the trees where they’ve put some new roads in.
“Last year was good in terms of the feeling in the car and how we got up to speed with these roads and obviously we can put the crash on the smaller rally last month behind us to move forward and look forward to this one.
“Hopefully the bad luck and mistakes, whatever you want to call it, are out of the window and we can focus on having a good event.
“It’s a big help to start with having done the event last year it’s very fast and having notes even if it is only for half the rally which is ultimately what it is, it’s a nice headstart. The other half, the new half, is fairly equal for most, we’ll look forward and see how it goes.”
The recce for the weekend’s stages were completed mainly in the rain, with some softer sections of the stages suffering.
The Rally Sweden winner added: “It has been raining quite heavy today and that made the recce a little bit more challenging in places.
“We know, for sure, some sections will cut up, we’ve seen that a little bit from last year and it will be the same this year some sections will be quite cut up. We have to wait and see how it really involves.
“But, you know, everything has been going well, we’re feeling good in the car we have to look forward and aim to do the best we can.”
