Bad days for World Rally champions are good days for most of us. To be third overall after Friday’s opening leg of Rally Chile, just 10.1 seconds off the lead, is hardly a poor return.
But this hasn’t been Kalle Rovanperä’s rally so far. The smile and the swagger have been swamped by struggle.
What’s been the problem?”
“It’s me!” Rovanperä replied. “I should be better.”
He also revealed he wasn’t “fully surprised” to have been so bereft of that magical effortless feeling all rally drivers crave, and that he “expected” to struggle on Friday’s stages.
But how can he be better? And perhaps more pertinently, where can he be better?
The driving hasn't come naturally for Rovanperä on Friday
“I just feel that I’m not really driving to the full potential of the car and myself, to be honest,” Rovanperä told DirtFish.
“I cannot really find the right feeling with the setup and the driving to be honest. The driving style what you need to have on these stages is completely opposite than what I normally do on gravel, so it’s not so easy to adapt.”
Some events suit certain drivers; others don’t. And the Chilean stages don’t play to Rovanperä’s natural strengths.
He explained: “It’s a really hard road base where you get one quite narrow driving line where it’s really high grip and off the line [there] is no grip at all. So yeah, you just need to follow the line.
“The line goes from inside to inside every corner. Quite different than [how] I normally drive, always late apex and sideways a bit, not like too much, but on small angle.
“Now you just need to go front-end first [and] follow the line. So yeah, just the driving andalso the setup for me.
“It doesn’t really feel I can be much quicker like that.”
Beyond the fact he is still in podium position and poised to secure valuable points for Toyota in its tricky task to recover ground to Hyundai in the manufacturers’ championship, the encouraging thing for Rovanperä is Saturday’s stage characteristics are different.
His current struggle shouldn’t be an ongoing one.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged, “at least last year I think we had a bit better feeling on tomorrow’s area at least, so it’s still going to be a tricky tire choice.
“Morning is really cold, a lot of tire wear still, what tires to use and everything, so it will be a tricky day, but I hope we can have at least a better feeling and a better pace.”
And with just those 10.1s to make up to catch up to overnight leader Ott Tänak, Rovanperä has far from given up on claiming a 15th WRC victory of his career this weekend.
“Yeah, for sure not,” he said. “It’s not too bad considering how I felt the whole day, not happy basically at any point.
“It’s not so bad, so yeah, of course we try to fight back as best as we can.”
