Is experience an excuse?
The common thinking in the World Rally Championship today is yes.
With drivers effectively able to memorize stages now, knowledge of rallies and their characteristics is king. Any driver without it stands to be at an immediate disadvantage when every tenth of a second matters.
Sami Pajari’s performances in 2025 could be used as evidence to support this theory. Safari Rally Kenya may have yielded his best result (fourth), but Finland and Chile are widely regarded as his two strongest rallies of the year so far.
The significance? The Finn drove them both last year in a Rally1 Toyota GR Yaris. That surely can’t be a coincidence?
Pajari has been noticably better when he's returned to rallies he previously started in Rally1
The thing is, Pajari’s not too interested in this thesis. While he accepts it may be a factor in his own improvement, he’s aware that he’s always going to be at a disadvantage in the experience stakes.
He believes at one point, he just needs to go for it.
“In one way, I will never catch them with the experience, so I think at one point you just need to kind of say to yourself that ‘OK now I have enough experience’,” Pajari told DirtFish. “And still you then just need to fight with them.
“That’s like the case what happened with Kalle [Rovanperä] for example, like he’s still by far less experienced than some of the guys but he has already enough to fight with them.
“So I’m trying to find that moment when we can really start to challenge them properly.”
It's nice to see that the events which I did last year has been clearly the strongest this yearSami Pajari
Rovanperä has more world championships than Ott Tänak and Thierry Neuville, but less than half the WRC starts of either. He won the world title in just his third full season.
Pajari’s not quite at that point with next month’s Central European Rally just his 15th attempt in a top-class car, but he is content that his most recent appearance in Chile was his best yet.
“I think in a way, yes,” he said. “The performance was really, really solid and clearly now there were many, many stages where we were doing exactly the same [time] like basically anyone else.
“So that’s really, really nice to see and really, really cool because in a way… yeah, it’s still part of the learning at this point of the career, but still, step by step, we really need to be fighting with the others. So, I’m happy with that.”
Asked specifically about the benefit of prior experience on rallies, Pajari said it made “some difference”.
He explained: “I must say it makes it still quite much easier when you know a little bit more what to expect so, at least now, I think it’s quite clear and in a way it’s nice to see that the events which I did last year like Finland and Chile this has been clearly the strongest this year.
Pajari is happy to be performing well on roads previously travelled
“So it’s kind of encouraging to see that experience is really playing the role and it’s much easier to go for the events which you already did. So in a way that’s nice to see.”
Same again at CER, then?
“Somehow Central Europe is always a big challenge – at that time of the year you also always have some rain and a lot of cuts and it’s like a messy Tarmac which I found quite challenging sometimes, but still we had already last year some stages with a good speed,” Pajari said.
“And especially this year like in Canarias… OK, it was more like a clean Tarmac, but still the pace on Tarmac was really OK. So in a way it’s nice to go back on Tarmac.”
Experience is therefore a benefit, but lacking it – as Pajari’s compatriot proved many years ago – is not always an excuse.
