I’m back from Rallye Deutschland and at M-Sport headquarters today catching up on some emails.
I’m quite pleased with my result in Germany – we hadn’t done any testing in the [Ford] Focus on asphalt since the last all-tarmac round in Bulgaria in June so I wasn’t sure how it would go. We had a few ups and downs throughout the weekend, I didn’t have as much experience using the hard compound Pirelli P-Zero tyres compared to the softer tyres so our times suffered a little bit. It was good to get some practice using them though, especially as we have two further asphalt rounds coming up this season.
Saturday was probably our most difficult day, we had a whole new set of notes for Saturday morning’s stages so that slowed us down and then Kimi Räikkönen, who we had been ahead for most of the rally, started to pull away from us. It was so frustrating. However, Sunday was much better and we put in a clear run on the day’s first stage which put us back in the hunt. Kimi was close on our tail throughout the day though and as the last stage of the rally was a Super Special I was pretty nervous – Kimi had a definite advantage as it was his preferred surface from his Formula One days. He put in the fastest time but I finished the Super Special second-fastest and secured sixth place ahead of him. I was pleased to have fought back and it’s been my best result in Germany to date – a good rally all round.
We also had some new team-mates in Germany – Francois Duval and Denis Giraudet. I hadn’t worked with Francois for a couple of years and it was nice to see him back in a rally car after several months away from the WRC. Scott [Martin] and I were impressed by how fast he was, especially on Saturday before he had his big crash. We were behind him on the stage and saw what had happened before everybody else – Francois was standing outside the car which was on its roof and waved us on but I couldn’t see Denis. We were both concerned as we hadn’t seen Denis and thought maybe something had happened to him but we later found out he was OK – it was a huge relief. The guys were lucky in a sense – the hinkelsteins that are littered at the side of that stage are designed to stop tanks as the area used to be a military zone, if they’d impacted directly on a hinkelstein instead of just beside it then it could have been much, much worse.
I’m going to London tomorrow for a couple of days with my family but then I’ll be back at the end of this week to prepare for Japan. Japan is an interesting place – it’s so different culturally. I’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with the country, it’s great initially because it’s so different but after I’ve been there for a week I’m ready to come home again. We’ve got a good track record over there – I finished fourth there a few years ago so hopefully we can do well again there this year. I can’t believe there’s only four WRC rounds remaining – this year has gone so quickly, I’m aiming for another top five before the end of the season.
MW




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