Andreas Mikkelsen arrived at the final stop control and looked resigned to his fate.
Teemu Suninen, pumped up after a big stage win on the previous test, was breathing down his neck. Mikkelsen knew he had to win to keep his WRC2 title aspirations alive, but the condition of the stage was treacherous.
Had he done enough?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I tried to go as fast as I can but there was a lot of water in the lines, I had a lot of aquaplaning.”
But amidst all of this intrigue, Mikkelsen had another query.
“Normally it’s the opposite way, we start last [in the running order] when we are leading [the rally] but now they want us to be first.”
Mikkelsen wasn’t where he expected to be. Starting behind his rival (as he assumed he would be) would’ve given him the benefit of some lines to follow, and potentially even a read of the conditions if he had enough time to briefly check the livestream before starting the stage.
So why wasn’t Mikkelsen behind Suninen, Emil Lindholm and Jari Huttunen in the powerstage running order like everyone expected him to be?
On the first day of competition in a World Rally Championship event, the Priority 1 (Rally1) drivers head onto the stages in championship order and the Priority 2 (WRC2) drivers line up in the order in which they have been seeded.
That then shifts for days two and three where the overall Priority 1 leaderboard after the previous leg is flipped on its head, so the lowest classified (or super-rallying driver) starts first and the rally leader is last of the top cars onto the stage, while for Priority 2 the drivers file in in the order they are classified.
But for the powerstage, which is always scheduled for 1.18pm CET, an entirely new running order is devised. The Priority 1 order is the leaderboard from the penultimate stage flipped, meaning that the driver that is poised to win the rally is always the last one that appears on the 1.5 hour live broadcast.
However with Priority 2, it’s far more complicated. Normally at least a few Rally2 cars will start the stage ahead of the Rally1 machines, but the exact quantity depends both on the length of the powerstage and how many Rally1 cars are remaining in the rally.
That last point was particularly pertinent in Estonia.
The retirements of both M-Sport’s Pierre-Louis Loubet and Gus Greensmith slimmed the Rally1 entry to just nine for the powerstage. That meant four WRC2 cars were required to start ahead of the main field to fulfil the TV quota.
In normal circumstances, that would’ve meant Huttunen’s Ford Fiesta Rally2 would’ve opened the stage, followed by Lindholm’s Škoda, Suninen’s Hyundai and then Mikkelsen’s Fabia Rally2 evo.
But there was a problem. Because the first car onto the stage gets more air-time than any other as the TV director doesn’t have any other cars to cut to, it absolutely has to be carrying an onboard camera.
And Huttunen wasn’t carrying one. Nor was Lindholm.
That left the FIA, WRC Promoter and Rally Estonia organizer with just one option: plonk Mikkelsen to the front. Suninen was carrying a camera, but it would make no logical sense to run the top two from four out of sequence, so the decision was taken to just run them in their leaderboard position.
How can that be, you may ask? Well it’s against convention, but it’s not against regulation.
The effect this could've had on the competition was huge
Article 50.3 of the WRC’s sporting regulations states that “the start order and intervals of the cars which will be covered by live TV will be decided by the FIA and the WRC Promoter in discussion with the clerk of the course.”
It’s therefore, essentially, a free reign.
On a stage such as Kambja 2 which was consistently evolving and changing due to the rain, the effect this could’ve had on the competition was huge. Ultimately it made little difference as Suninen’s attack was thwarted by his engine dropping to two cylinders, but it created a more nail-biting finish for Mikkelsen as he had to wait for his rival to finish.
As it happened, Mikkelsen’s run was “amazing”.
“The stage before, he [Suninen] was really quick,” Mikkelsen told DirtFish.
“It started to rain already on that one and it’s all about how much you want to risk then. Being a little bit over 10 seconds, of course you want to push but you still have 10 seconds, so you don’t need to go crazy and then time is running, you know?
“But on the last one we just went absolutely flat out, we didn’t think about any kind of lead. We thought let’s just have the mindset that we’re 10 seconds behind and we need to catch 10 seconds instead. We had an amazing stage.”
He certainly did, going quickest in WRC2 and third fastest in among the Rally1 crews. Mikkelsen may not have understood why he was given the honor, but it was certainly a performance befitting of opening the show.
