It’s time for the second in the trio of super-fast gravel rallies forming a spectacular summer in the 2024 World Rally Championship. After the return to familiar ground in Poland, and before the annual pilgrimage to Finland, it’s something entirely new for the WRC this week in the form of Rally Latvia.
A handful of the top-flight drivers have driven the roads around Liepāja before during its years in the European Rally Championship, but some of them will only have done so when the stages were covered in ice and snow.
Of course, there is one driver that probably knows Liepāja better than anyone, and will now be armed with the additional hybrid power he didn’t have in Poland:
Entry list
Total 40 crews
10 Rally1 crews
24 Rally2 crews (23 WRC2)
4 Rally3 crews (4 WRC3)
Rally1
Toyota will bring four GR Yaris Rally1s to Latvia
The Rally1 field stretches into double figures for the first time in 2024, as Toyota brings its full squad of four regular drivers for just the second time this season. The fourth car was originally slated for Sami Pajari to make his Rally1 debut, but that will now happen on his home event in Finland instead with Sébastien Ogier being parachuted in for Latvia.
Having had to sit out Rally Poland following his recce accident, Ogier has been cleared to compete once more alongside his victorious Polish stand-in Kalle Rovanperä – who spent several of his teenage years competing on Latvian gravel – and Toyota’s full-season competitors Elfyn Evans and Takamoto Katsuta. As in Portugal when this quartet last appeared together, it’s Katsuta that isn’t nominated to score manufacturers’ points.
Hyundai’s regulars Thierry Neuville and Ott Tänak are joined by Esapekka Lappi for the first time since Kenya in March. Lappi, who won a wintery Rally Liepāja a decade ago, returned to action on a national rally in Lithuania last weekend, after Tänak had a short-lived outing on home soil at Rally Estonia.
M-Sport fields the same three drivers as in Poland, but with Latvia’s own Mārtiņš Sesks now in a hybrid Ford Puma Rally1 just like Adrien Fourmaux and Grégoire Munster. It was always the plan for Sesks to step up to the full-spec Puma for his home roads, even before his giantkilling debut performance in Poland.
WRC2
Greensmith will be looking to reverse the tide of his last two events in WRC2
The WRC2 entry is similar in size to that seen in Rally Poland, with 23 cars. Unsurprisingly, many of the same names feature, but there are some interesting novelties too.
With his Rally1 debut deferred, Sami Pajari still makes the trip to Latvia and needs just three points to overhaul Yohan Rossel (who is absent once more) at the top of the standings. But his sights are more likely to be set on a third successive win in his Toyota GR Yaris Rally2 after commanding victories in Sardinia and Poland.
Oliver Solberg is just seven points further back from the lead, and a driver with two outright Rally Liepāja wins to his name from 2020 and 2021. Rather like Rovanperä, Solberg rallied regularly in Latvia as a teenager.
Another with extensive experience and success in Latvia is Nikolay Gryazin – a three-time former winner of Rally Liepāja – although the Citroën driver has intriguingly decided not to register for WRC2 points so won’t be improving upon his current fourth place in the standings.
Solberg is joined in the Toksport Škoda awning once again by Gus Greensmith and Josh McErlean, both keen to push Polish disappointments behind them. There’s no Lauri Joona or Roope Korhonen, but still plenty of fast Finns in action with Mikko Heikkilä’s first WRC2 start since Sweden in his Toyota while the Hyundai duo Emil Lindholm and Teemu Suninen will be desperate to get their tough campaigns firing.
Without a doubt the most interesting addition to the class is Brandon Semenuk, the two-time American Rally Association National champion making his WRC debut in a GR Yaris Rally2.
WRC3
With no Junior WRC in Latvia, there’s just four cars entered in WRC3 and the championship leader Diego Domínguez is not among them after three consecutive wins in the class.
Jan Černý, who’s third in the points, will be there for his fifth start of the year in his Ford Fiesta Rally3, joined by three less experienced newcomers: Estonia’s Joosep Ralf Nõgene in a Renault Clio, Turkish ERC3 contender Kerem Kazaz in a Ford and Taiwanese woman Enola Hsieh, who drives a Fiesta run by Latvian squad Sports Racing Technologies.
Itinerary
While the rally is based in Liepāja on Latvia’s south-west coast, it will start from the capital city of Riga with an impressive lengthy opening super special of 6.92 miles, taking in the Biķernieki rallycross circuit.
Drivers won’t need to worry so much about tire wear as there’s a tire-fitting zone before Friday’s leg, which is the longest of the rally at 75.14 competitive miles and takes the action north-west from Riga to areas visited in the ERC years. But service until crews return to Liepāja on Friday evening.
Three stages are run in the morning, the first two of which – Milzkalne and the 17.1-mile Tukums – are repeated in the same form after another tire-fitting zone at lunchtime. The third stage, Andumi, is modified heavily to run as Strazde before another stage, Talsi, runs to round out the day.
Saturday is shorter at 62.7 miles and there is a mid-day service, with the action taking place in the region around Liepāja. However, unusually, only the last of the morning’s four stages – Vecpils – to be run again later in the day, with three new stages forming the rest of the afternoon loop including a 1.59-mile city stage in Liepāja itself.
The final day on Sunday runs to a more traditional format totalling 39.8 miles: two stages run twice, separated by a regroup rather than service. The 8.3 miles of Mazilmāja will host the rally-ending powerstage on its second pass, finishing on the Vecpils dirt track.
