World Rally champion Kalle Rovanperä and championship leader Thierry Neuville have led calls questioning whether it was safe to run Saturday’s penultimate extremely foggy stage of Rally Chile.
SS11, the second pass of Lota, proved decisive across Saturday’s leg, as Rovanperä vaulted ahead of Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans to lead the rally – primarily because he was braver in the extremely thick fog.
However plenty of drivers felt the conditions were on the limit, with Rovanperä remarking at the end of the stage that he had never driven in worse fog in a rally car before.
The stage was red flagged after WRC2 contender Fabrizio Zaldivar had completed “due to worsening fog”.
Rovanperä feels drivers can handle the challenge of such conditions, but questioned whether it was a responsible course of action.
Visibility was an extreme challenge on SS11
“I think the middle one of the rally is… yeah, that’s already a condition that can be cancelled,” he told DirtFish.
“Of course, today it played in our favor, so it’s good that we drove it. But also, at the end, at some point, we need to really think about also other people’s safety.
“It’s not only us. We can handle it. But if you just make a human error, I don’t know, there is junctions and places everywhere, like holes between the trees, but everything looks the same.
“When you’re in the fog, you can actually miss like the whole stage and go off the road and you don’t even know that you went off the road. I don’t know. If something like that happens, it can be really dangerous.
“For sure, [from a] driver point of view, I can drive there. But at some point, yeah, for sure, it’s quite dangerous.”
Neuville, who was quickest on the stage by five seconds, agreed.
“Honestly, my first reaction when we passed the finish line was that it was not very safe and it should have been cancelled probably, especially if we think about, yeah, if something happens, I’m not sure that the emergency vehicles will get through,” he told DirtFish.
Neuville agreed with world champion Rovanperä's take
“We’ll find the right way, actually, without having any pacenotes or whatever. So I think that, yeah, it was not safe to run it.
“The last stage was also very challenging, but I would say that it was possible. But the second last was too much.”
Elfyn Evans reckoned SS11 “was on the limit” however highlighted that dealing with such extreme conditions is part of rallying’s DNA.
He told DirtFish: “I’m not really one to shout for things to be canceled. It’s part of the sport to deal with difficult conditions. I think probably where we were at the top there, you know, in the spectator area and stuff, it was probably a bit on the limit. We couldn’t even define the edge of the road, let alone in front.
“So when it’s like that, you know, it’s on the edge, but it’s also part of the sport.”
It is dangerous, but rallying is always dangerous. It's your decision how fast you want to go.Esapekka Lappi
Esapekka Lappi meanwhile felt the stage was “fine” to run as it did.
“I mean, you can judge yourself if you want to drive fast or not,” he told DirtFish.
“We decided to do it very slowly because we had nothing to fight for. So it’s easy for us, you know, because we were in that kind of position. But I think both of them [SS11 and SS12] were very bad. At least I had the same visibility, basically zero at some moments.
“It is dangerous, but rallying is always dangerous so it’s not enjoyable at all, I’m not saying that. But it’s your decision as well how fast you want to go.”
DirtFish has contacted the Rally Chile organizer for a response.
