World Rally Championship drivers feel the wet weather conditions of Friday afternoon were too extreme for competition at Rally Finland.
A deluge of rain arrived just after SS7 Saarikas started at 3.49pm, and continued as crews tackled SS8 Sydänmaa one hour later.
That shook up the leaderboard as some, like Elfyn Evans, moved up the standings despite struggles with visibility, but others – such as Adrien Fourmaux, Thierry Neuville and Takamoto Katsuta – lost minutes due to the adverse conditions.
Evans’ immediate reaction at the end of SS8 was that the stage should not have run.
“It shouldn’t have happened, that’s the bottom line,” he told the stage-end reporter.
“When conditions are like this, somebody has to use a little bit of common sense. We don’t want to stop for a bit of rain but when you can’t see the road and the car is aquaplaning everywhere, I think a bit of common sense is needed.”
Describing what happened to DirtFish at the end-of-day media zone, the championship leader added: “It rained like so heavy just a minute before we were due into the stage. And when we set off down the first straight, I really could only just about make the green of the edge of the road out – the rain was that intense.
“And then the windscreen of course missed it up, nothing you can do when it’s like that and it felt like we were losing a minute you know in the first half of that stage. It wasn’t until I got a bit of vision back that I could start to drive again really, so yeah it’s been a tough afternoon.
“Of course some have had it worse than others. Taka has probably had the worst of it. So, you know, it’s a bit, yeah, it’s a bit of a lottery when it’s like this, but, you know, happy to get through it.”
Evans wasn’t alone in harboring safety concenrs.
Neuville told DirtFish: “I just think that conditions like this, no other motorsport would have continued in that condition. Now it’s always hard to predict and obviously a few cars were through [the stage], but if you look the onboard, my onboard, from the start the first five-six kilometers, you need big, big balls to drive that fast in those conditions.”
Asked if it was unsafe, he replied: “I didn’t feel safe, let’s say, while driving. Definitely not.
“I didn’t know what were the conditions for the other drivers, so that was the only reason I had to carry on. But obviously we saw Oliver, Adrian and myself had the worst by far.
“There’s enough people watching TV and around the stages who should be able to judge when it’s safe and not safe,” he added.
If you think Africa was dangerous, yeah, this was mad dangerousOliver Solberg
Solberg agreed with his former Hyundai team-mate, having suffered with water ingress through the air vent into the cockpit of his Toyota.
“[It was] absolutely crazy,” Solberg told DirtFish. “If you think Africa was dangerous, yeah, this was mad dangerous. You do 200 kilometers an hour, full of water in the car, wipers are full, you see nothing, absolutely nothing from the start.
“And I spoke to the guys on the stage, and they said there was rain before, but when I arrived, it was heavens open. It was completely different. And Elliott [Edmondson, co-driver] said, there is no chance you can go faster. I was flat on the straights, had no clue where I was, and still I lost a minute, yeah? So it’s just, that was a little bit unsafe. It was a bit stupid.”
M-Sport’s Josh McErlean told DirtFish his co-driver, Eoin Treacy, said during the stage “the thought the red flag would come on because the visibility was nil.
When told Neuville and Solberg both felt it was too dangerous, McErlean agreed: “Yeah, for me, it was definitely too dangerous. Whenever you actually can’t see, then there’s a problem. But anyway, if we hadn’t had this selfie stick [to clear the windshield], then we would have had to stop for sure and lost a lot more time, but yeah. It got better from there.”
McErlean was one of several drivers who found the conditions too extreme
Rally leader Sébastien Ogier has often been vocal about pushing for fair and equal conditions in rallying.
He told DirtFish: “Obviously it’s always a shame when the field cannot battle with the same condition. It’s often the case in rally obviously, it’s not the circuit racing where you go through all together the same condition.
“For us, yeah, the forecast, the meteo, can play a big role and this afternoon it turned in favor of Elfyn clearly but it was… you know after many times why you have to clean the road sometimes maybe it’s a payback you know.
“You can complain but for sure at some point it became veyr, very difficult to drive and close to survival. So in this moment for sure yeah, the main thing is there’s nothing bad happen because it was very tricky.”
