Kalle Rovanperä topped the timesheets on Rally Islas Canarias’ shakedown stage, besting the rest of the field by 2.5s on the 6.26km Santa Brigida test.
Straight out of the blocks the two-time world champion was a step ahead of the rest, setting the fastest first-run time by a whopping four seconds over his Rally1 rivals. On the second pass he improved his best time by a further 3.1s, reaching a benchmark time of 4m10s.
As Rovanperä himself highlighted, he was somewhat out of practice on WRC asphalt relative to his rivals, making his immediate pace even more impressive.
“It has actually been a long time for us to be on a proper tarmac rally,” he said. This year’s Monte Carlo excluded, his most recent asphalt outing in the WRC was Rally Japan in 2023 – one year and five months ago.
An early sticking point for several drivers was the pacenote-making process.
Recce roads open to the public led to a difficult note-taking experience for many crews
All Rally1 drivers were writing new notes from scratch: Elfyn Evans, who’d participated in the recce for last year’s Rally Islas Canarias when it was an ERC round, admitted the notes he’d written in 2024 were of little use.
With narrow roads and a busy island for rally week, multiple drivers highlighted how congestion during the recce had made pacenotes a more difficult task than usual.
Ott Tänak, 2.9s off the pace on shakedown and tied for third-fastest time with Hyundai team-mate Thierry Neuville, said: “The recce was very complicated with all the traffic but now the fun part starts.”
Sébastien Ogier, starting his second WRC event of the season, had similar issues: “It’s going to be very demanding, pace notes were not that easy to make [on the] recce with all the traffic.”
We have to manage the tires, it’s going to be the big topic this weekend.Adrien Fourmaux
Another key topic expected to dominate the rally is tires. Hankook’s hard compound asphalt tire makes its WRC debut in Gran Canaria, giving the crews yet another new variable to contend with.
“[It is] a challenge to learn this new tire again,” said Evans, who was 4.1s behind Rovanperä with the fifth-fastest time. “We’ve been saying it all year but it’s definitely still the case here.”
Keeping tires in the right temperature window is also a concern. Gran Canaria’s mountain roads are often cited as being as close to circuit racing as rally gets, with long flowing corner sequences demanding much of the front tires.
Seventh-fastest Adrien Fourmaux, 0.4s off Ogier’s best time ahead, highlighted it as a likely key narrative of the weekend.
“It’s really demanding stages, corner into corner,” explained Fourmaux. “We have to manage the tires, it’s going to be the big topic this weekend.”
One driver was already struggling with it: Grégoire Munster. The fastest M-Sport driver on shakedown was eighth, 5.3s off the pace and struggling to get the most from the new Hankooks.
Grégoire Munster scored fifth places on the last two asphalt WRC rounds he finished
“I don’t have much grip so I’m struggling a bit where normally you have a lot of grip,” said Munster. “We need to make the tire work and we’re gonna try to improve on that.”
Munster, along with Neuville, is the only Rally1 driver to have multiple previous starts on Rally Islas Canarias – though he expects that to provide little in the way of advantage.
“They almost didn’t use any roads from back then,” Munster said. “But for sure having an idea of how the grip can be and what the weather conditions can be up in the mountains is important, so we’ll take that. But track knowledge, there isn’t much.”
Sami Pajari and Josh McErlean propped up the rear of the Rally1 field in 9th and 10th, 5.5s and 7.9s off the pace respectively.
Nikolay Gryazin was the fastest WRC2 entrant despite only putting in a single run with his Śkoda Fabia RS, pipping reigning Spanish Superchampion Alejandro Cachón’s Toyota GR Yaris to fastest Rally2 time by 0.8s.
