Esapekka Lappi’s route to the Rally Finland podium wasn’t quite as simple as it could have been. Arriving at the end of the Ruuhimäki powerstage minus a windshield and even the roof of his Toyota pointed to a rather eventful conclusion to Lappi’s rally.
Lappi was all but consigned to third place on Saturday afternoon when, on the first stage of the loop, a rock that was flicked up by the car bizarrely bounced off a tree and then directly onto Lappi’s windshield, cracking it and obscuring his vision.
Heading into the final day he therefore had little to fight for, but Lappi’s day still became interesting when he rolled three times on the penultimate stage of the rally.
As he joked to DirtFish: “Friday was boring!”
But Lappi revealed that his SS21 crash was a result of a changed pacenote from the first pass of the stage that ultimately backfired.
“On the first pass I checked this corner that you can go a bit wide, you can use the exit of the corner that there is space,” he explained.
“But when I arrived there was a rut before the ditch, the road was worn, and then the slide stopped on the rut and immediately it started to roll. So it was like a big surprise, let’s say like this. And yeah, we rolled three times.”
It caused a fair bit of damage and TV cameras picked Lappi up, working to repair his wounded Yaris just beyond the finish-line of the stage.
He and co-driver Janne Ferm were seen patching up the Toyota’s radiator and refilling fluids under the hood; Lappi evoking memories of former Toyota team principal Tommi Mäkinen and current Toyota sporting director Kaj Lindström’s efforts on Rally Spain 2002 by running to a nearby lake to fill up water bottles that were poured into the engine bay.
“There was some leakage from the radiator, power-steering oils were on the windscreen as well and all over the place in the engine bay, and then windscreen was a bit broken – a bit more than yesterday!” Lappi said.
But Lappi stressed that the damage was mainly cosmetic: “These were the only issues to be fair.”
Heart rate no doubt raised, Lappi made it to the powerstage but such was the crack in the windshield he elected to kick it out, so not for the first time this season we saw a Rally1 driver blasting through a stage with goggles on, air pelting their face.
Lappi took it one step further than Gus Greensmith did on Safari Rally Kenya though as his Yaris was in convertible-spec, competing without a roof on the final stage.
While the missing windshield was intentional, the missing roof most certainly wasn’t.
“It felt funny!” said Lappi when asked how his compromised car felt to drive.
“The rear was a bit slippy because we were missing the wing, but otherwise the car worked normally.
“We just lost the roof on the first acceleration, when I put the fifth gear there was a horrible noise and the whole roof took off. And then the sun was shining and then we started to get some air in the car, and Janne really needed to shout the pacenotes because the wind sound was so heavy all the time.
“The jumps definitely we needed to take really easily, the aero wasn’t really impressive,”
Toyota has likely never considered releasing a drop-top version of its GR Yaris hot hatchback, but Lappi has marketed it perfectly with a podium finish in a rally version!
And although it was a rollercoaster of a weekend, the podium was Lappi’s target for Finland so in that sense it was very much mission accomplished. A satisfying accomplishment given all the work that had gone in.
“It doesn’t come easily, definitely,” he said.
“I did a lot of work with the videos, with the recce videos, with the onboards from last year. For sure we did a really good job in the test but this week every night I watched so many videos that I had a horrible headache on Friday, Saturday night and still Saturday morning.
“It’s a lot of effort, luckily it didn’t all go to the trash bin.”
