The 2022 World Rally Championship season has officially crossed the halfway line after round seven of 13 last weekend, Rally Estonia.
Popularized by home hero Ott Tänak, the 2019 world champion, Estonia has rapidly become one of the highlights of the year and this year’s edition was nothing short of spectacular, as rain changed the formation of the weekend entirely.
It was a great confidence booster for some (and a bit of a confidence wrecker for others) with a rather familiar name at the top of the timesheets.
Here’s what we learned from Rally Estonia 2022:
It really is a case of if, not when
At DirtFish, we’ve tried our best to tiptoe around the subject. The writing has been on the wall for some time, but actually taking the pen and scribbling on it ourselves hasn’t really been in the best interest of engaging fans with the current WRC season.
But we can’t ignore it any longer. It’s not a case of if Kalle Rovanperä will win this year’s world title, but when. As one of our writers put it in our internal chatroom, it’s becoming the ‘World Rovanperä Championship’.
It’s another box ticked: win a round of the WRC for a second time. Early on it would perhaps have been easy to suggest that Rovanperä was lucking into this one – an incredible fifth win from seven starts in 2022 – given the timing of the rain on Friday’s final stage that ultimately did play to his advantage.
But Rovanperä still drove the thing with more commitment and bravery than anybody else to fully capitalize on the opportunity and throw Elfyn Evans onto the back foot. And what followed thereafter was simply extraordinary.
Have we ever seen a powerstage performance as good as that? Over 20 seconds faster than anybody else, Rovanperä isn’t just in a league of his own, he’s from another galaxy. He must be. The dictionary doesn’t include enough words to describe his driving anymore.
What we’re seeing from Rovanperä is as good as we’ve seen from any of the WRC greats in their peak. He’s making winning look effortless, he’s making winning a habit. An astonishing 83 points to the good, Rovanperä’s only challenge now this year is himself.
And the really bad news for his rivals is Rally Finland is up next. In this kind of form, there’s absolutely no chance this young Finn will settle for anything other than first place in Jyväskylä.
2022 just isn’t Evans’ year
Jari-Matti Latvala could see it. The head was up, the shoulders were back, one of his drivers was oozing confidence on Friday morning. And it wasn’t the one with the whopping championship lead and the Finnish flag on the side window.
Elfyn Evans had become Kalle Rovanperä for the day, leaving everyone in his wake with a hot streak of five stage wins on the bounce. But then the rain came. The timing was poor and it cost Evans badly. It was in many ways unjust that Evans didn’t hold the advantage going into Saturday.
And that proved to be the ultimate turning point. Once Rovanperä was out front, Evans simply had no reply to his team-mate’s devastating rhythm. A spin on Sunday exaggerated the gap, but natural 2022 order had been restored once the lead had been grabbed from Evans’ hands.
Would it have been any different had the rain not come at the end of Friday and Evans had still been ahead on the second full day? It’s impossible to know, but it’s clear that Evans just isn’t getting the rub of the green this season.
Even when his performance is on the money, he just isn’t quite getting the breaks he needs. It’s now been nine months since his last WRC victory and he has made mistakes this season, but in Estonia he drove like a winner. The problem was that his team-mate drove like a champion.
Loubet’s still susceptible to errors
Pierre-Louis Loubet’s 2022 season has been one of the most impressive campaigns so far considering the level he is performing at relative to what was widely expected of him. But the wind was knocked out of his sails a little in Estonia.
Things had been going swimmingly as Loubet had crept up to sixth place after stage eight, despite bedding himself into the Ford Puma Rally1 on high-speed gravel stages. But then it all took a bit of a tumble when Loubet locked up in the treacherously wet conditions and rolled.
But the real damage was done on Sunday morning’s opener, the atypical Tartu Vald test, when the M-Sport driver found a rock hidden in the overgrown grass and terminally damaged his front-left suspension.
It’s hard to apportion too much blame on Loubet for either incident in all fairness. The tumble on Friday was a result of ultra-tricky road conditions that caught out several others (albeit less dramatically) while plenty of drivers were quick to sympathize with Loubet on Sunday as the offending rocks were “blind” according to Elfyn Evans.
But equally, after the stunning highs of recent rallies, this was a clear reminder that Loubet still has plenty of learning to do to become an elite rally driver. This one looked like a simple mistake on the recce. His response in Finland will be key.
Fourmaux is finding his feet again
How many times has Adrien Fourmaux been the sole M-Sport driver to not retire at any stage throughout a WRC weekend this year?
We’ll spare you the trouble of calculating, he hasn’t been. But he was in Estonia. And while that isn’t necessarily the best reader of his performance, it’s a clear indication that he’s beginning to turn a corner.
Fourmaux has been rightfully criticized this year for his run of expensive and costly accidents, but he should in turn be praised for doing a good job. And he did a really good job in Estonia, doing exactly what was asked of him by the team while also seemingly rediscovering his swagger in the process.
Craig Breen was M-Sport’s front-running hope in Estonia but a mistake on Friday morning put paid to that challenge, so the responsibility to bring home points soon rested on Fourmaux and Gus Greensmith’s shoulders.
But Fourmaux never shirked his responsibility, keeping things in check while also allowing himself to fall into a free-flowing rhythm.
His pace wasn’t sit-up-and-take-notice impressive, but he did bank his first-ever WRC stage win outside of Kenya and kept Takamoto Katsuta honest in a fight for fifth that neither wanted to engage in.
Most importantly, Fourmaux managed to find the right balance between pushing on and avoiding any silly risks. He’s not managed that very much, if at all, so far this season.
The powerstage was the perfect case in point. In the horrendous conditions, he backed off massively and simply brought it home. It cost him sixth place, but crucially it didn’t hurt M-Sport’s manufacturers’ championship points haul at all.
The Fourmaux that took the WRC by storm early last year may not be far away from re-emerging after all.
Fast gravel doesn’t suit Hyundai either
You just wouldn’t want to be an employee of Hyundai Motorsport right now, would you? The team is currently deep in a dark hole, and the exit of the tunnel seems to be getting further and further away.
Alarm bells were immediately ringing once we learned that Hyundai hadn’t actually tested in Estonia for Rally Estonia, instead solely using its permanent test site in Finland. While Rally Estonia and Rally Finland are broadly similar in nature, there are some key differences in road characteristics and the drivers felt it.
Thierry Neuville, Hyundai’s attack dog who’ll not give up on anything, was three-legged in Estonia. Even before the rally began he’d talked himself out of the fight for victory, and he simply didn’t have the confidence in the car at any point during the weekend to extract every tenth out of it like he normally does.
He likened driving his i20 N Rally1 in the rain to walking on eggshells.
Oliver Solberg’s miserable run of form and misfortune continued when he nosed a tree and broke his power-steering, while Ott Tänak’s dreams of another home victory were thwarted because he didn’t have the tools to do the job.
Has Hyundai’s gambit to copy Toyota and designate Finland as one of its testing bases failed? In three weeks we may have a better answer there. But it’s fairly evident that in a season where it has struggled for pace and reliability, Hyundai was again on the back foot on the first high-speed gravel of the season.
It must be said M-Sport Ford didn’t escape scot-free from Estonia either, as Gus Greensmith ran into technical trouble on the final morning – yet another setback in his rapidly unraveling season.
Things are bad at Hyundai, but they’re only truly great at Toyota at the moment after yet another rally where its car looked not just the most reliable but the quickest too.
Mikkelsen’s back to being WRC2 favorite
Job done. Andreas Mikkelsen needed a win on Rally Estonia to keep his WRC2 title defense alive, and a win is precisely what he got. The maximum three powerstage points to boot made it simply the perfect reply to his rivals who may have hoped Mikkelsen’s pair of mechanical DNFs had ruled him out of the running.
Mikkelsen’s bound to carry one of his zeros forward towards his final championship total, but the way he’s driving it might not even matter. Yet again in Estonia, Mikkelsen judged it perfectly – pushing when he felt comfortable but tactically backing off to minimize the risks in the trickier sections.
It’s a win that moves him back to the top of the championship standings, three points clear of Kajetan Kajetanowicz who likened Rally Estonia to a high-speed train that he forgot to board the carriage on.
Mikkelsen is back to being the favorite once again. Yohan Rossel is probably his biggest threat from here, so it could all come down to whether the two compete against each other on the same rally or not. Because in a one-on-one fight, Mikkelsen looks unbeatable in WRC2 right now.
But above all else, who else is absolutely loving this category now all Rally2 cars have been lumped into the same championship?
Spectator safety cannot be ignored
Rally Estonia was a brilliant event, and the fans played a huge part in that. The ceremonial start in Tartu was more like a sell-out rock concert than a rally.
But due to every single stage of the WRC now being televised, any antics out on the stages don’t go unmissed and unfortunately – like on the season-opening Monte Carlo Rally – there were a couple of rather alarming instances that we simply have to call out.
Oliver Solberg had a bit of a scare on the second pass of Otepää: “In the middle of the stage before the arena there were two people in the middle of the road on a flat left, so that was crazy,” he said. “I just came there and they were in the middle of the road and they had to jump away.”
It's precisely why moving location and crossing a live rally stage is an extremely dangerous move
Watching the onboard back, it’s plausible that these spectators had been caught out by the gap between Craig Breen and Solberg being far less than three minutes given Breen punctured. But it’s precisely why moving location and crossing a live rally stage is an extremely dangerous move.
What occurred two stages earlier on the Elva test was utterly inexcusable, reckless and simply incomprehensible from one individual though.
The moment was caught on the livestream, but consulting the onboard makes it even more terrifying to watch. Kalle Rovanperä is flat chat, negotiating a series of undulating crests before hitting a small straight stretch.
What he shouldn’t be seeing is a man standing right on the edge of the road, and seemingly about to walk out in front of the Toyota. Rovanperä checks up and has to brake earlier for the corner than planned, but he’s largely unfazed by it given the intensity of competition.
But this was an extremely alarming and utterly bewildering incident that could so very easily have ended with dire consequences. Quite what this spectator was thinking is anybody’s guess, but this was appallingly unsafe behavior that simply cannot be tolerated.
Organizers can always do more, and rest assured Urmo Aava and his team won’t take this lying down. But ultimately the buck stops with you if you are spectating a live rally stage. Don’t be like this clown. Watch the world’s best from a safe distance to ensure you can go back home to your loved ones.
