Originally Posted by
AnttiL
Last night I was speechless.
The two retired Sebs, awesome, especially for Loeb to just come from Dakar and a year off WRC. And we were ready to write him off after the Hyundai years.
The Fords were amazing, I'm so happy to see them back at the pace. And nice to see Greensmith so high on the stage times although he had different tyres. In fact Breen was slightly disappointing by being the slowest one. Fourmaux doing more or less what I expected.
As for Toyota, it seems the car is fast but doesn't fit Kalle's driving style. As he said at the end of SS2 it understeers and it's difficult for him. Hopefully he can learn to change his style quickly (as he has done before) or they can do something about the setup (now with no centre diff it's difficult to make changes). Also interesting that they've agreed to do the whole year with that diff setup that's so hard for him, the must have noticed this time loss on the tests? But apparently it fits Elfyn (and Seb) better. Based on what happened with Citroen in 2019, this setup will not fit Esapekka.
Hyundais...they were the slowest but then again all cars had issues. Hopefully they can get the package together, shakedown pace was promising but like I said, it was a very slow stage so it didn't tell anything about corners with higher speed, long straights, big accelerations and brakings.
And finally, none of the cars retired! And Rally2 cars didn't win stages!
PS: I won a beer from Miika Wuorela because back in May (when Compact Dynamics pulled back their hybrid units from tests) he wanted to bet big money on Rally1 hybrid cars not happening in 2022. I agreed but I said I never gamble on bigger bets than "a beer" so that's what we agreed on. :D