Kalle Rovanperä missed out on a home Rally Finland victory but the Toyota driver still feels proud of finishing second.
Rovanperä has dominated this year’s World Rally Championship season, winning five of the last seven events to establish a whopping 94-point lead over Tänak in the championship.
In such form, Rovanperä was widely tipped as the favorite to win last weekend despite the handicap of running first on the road. After all, that disadvantage hadn’t stopped him in Portugal, Kenya or Estonia.
But in the end Ott Tänak paid Rovanperä back for winning on his patch three weeks ago by beating the Finn in Finland – so why did Rovanperä finish the rally still satisfied?
The championship. Right from the off Rovanperä made it clear it was a bigger priority than hometown glory, and so it proved.
“That’s why I wanted to finish second,” he told DirtFish. “I wanted to bring the good points also from the powerstage. I can be happy. We can be quite proud.
“We opened the road and then we pushed and tried to catch [up]. We couldn’t do it, but we are here and we are still having a bigger points lead than before so it’s not bad.”
Rovanperä would of course loved to have won in Finland, admitting “you want to give the best result for the fans and yourself”.
But in the circumstances, and particularly after Sunday morning’s final stage where Tänak beat him by 1.9 seconds, Rovanperä was more than happy to sacrifice the win in lieu of the bigger picture.
As such, he drove “within my limits” and elected not to hang it all on the line in pursuit of glory because the risk didn’t outweigh the reward. In fact, there wasn’t really any reward in that strategy at all.
“I straight away knew in the first few corners [of Sunday] that this is the pace what I can do,” Rovanperä explained.
“If I take some crazy risks I can be a few seconds faster and that would have been the same time as Ott. So it’s not enough to drive the same speed when he’s taking the risks and I’m not. So I don’t need to take it at this point.”
Tänak and Hyundai’s win meant that Toyota lost its impressive record of never being defeated on Rally Finland since it rejoined the WRC in 2017.
But like his driver – and for the very same reasons – Toyota team principal Jari-Matti Latvala insisted that the Rally Finland result was positive for the team.
“I’m not disappointed. We had a good weekend,” Latvala told DirtFish.
“We finished second, third and fourth and also with Taka [Katsuta] there in sixth position. In the end, we bought four cars back to the finish, and then this time the rally winner was going 110% for the victory.
“He didn’t think too much about the championship. Our drivers had to think about the championship and they were doing a clever job thinking about the points, bringing the points home.
“And OK, we lost. For sure there is a little bit of disappointment, but you have to see the bigger picture.”
