When Kalle Rovanperä woke up on Sunday morning, it’s a fair assumption he wasn’t expecting to outshine the 18th supreme pontiff, Pope Pontian.
Word is that Pope Pontian died in exile on the island of Tavolara in 235. Tavolara was that enormous limestone outcrop that kept filling the windshield of cars on the final stage of the Rally Italy Sardinia.
And for a while, Tavolara caught the eye fairly consistently. That and the agonisingly twisty, technical road that ran alongside this stretch of the northeast Sardinian coast. Then the second to last Rally1 car left the start line and the magic happened.
Across the next 11 minutes and 24 seconds, Rovanperä, Jonne Halttunen and their Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 gave folk something to ponder beyond the Pope in this part of the world. After an event which, by the Finn’s own admission, had failed to spark, the powerstage comprehensively combusted.
In 8.51 miles, the two-time world champion took 8.1 seconds out of everybody. And this on the points-paying stage where everybody rips. The 24-year-old must have been hyped beyond belief on the back of a ride like that?
Rovanperä didn't see what all the fuss was about with his powerstage performance
Asked to talk DirtFish readers through those 8.51 miles, Rovanperä looked a touch taken aback and smiled thinly.
“It was nothing special, in my opinion,” he said.
As collected jaws hit the floor, Kalle kindly filled the silence with some more of his thoughts.
“It was a clean stage, but like I said, it doesn’t feel good in the car on that stage. Probably the same thing for everybody: it’s just super-narrow, really tricky, a lot of ruts. I think everybody, [from] what I was talking, was struggling.
“[We had] a lot of understeer, a lot of tricky places. For sure, I had a good push. I was pushing, but yeah… clearly we did something right!”
So this didn’t answer that definitive question of whether Rovanperä was back to his best?
“No,” he laughed, “third place is not back to the best!”
Typical champion mentality, always looking for more.
Even if he didn’t deliver the line we wanted, at least he updated a 1,790-year-old history lesson.
