Portuguese Rally News

[Rally Power]

The infamous stone, which turned a fantastic rally into a shameful mess…



Tuga already explained the situation but it’s not fair to blame the organizers. They cancelled that stage and delayed the start of the last one, making possible for Bruno to evaluate the damages on the car and start the final SS in time. The late decision to penalize Bruno with 35s for inappropriate behavior was made by the steward’s college, not the organizers.

Bruno’s attitude it’s understandable: he was giving everything to keep the rally leadership and that abnormal incident seemed to have ruined his efforts. But his remarks weren’t totally accurate: it was pretty obvious that he stopped the other guys because he felt he was victim of sabotage, not for safety reasons, as he later claimed. And even if we accept that the stone was purposely placed there, it’s not clear that spectators were near and it’s a bit hard to believe that a Marshall witnessed someone dropping it into the road and did no effort to remove it.

Above all, this was a sad end for the rally and it wasn’t only Bruno, Alexandre (that lost concentration and was beaten by Fontes on last SS) and their codrivers that were undermined; the whole sport gets affected by these situations. Besides classification issues, if it comes clear this really was a sabotage I hope that in a near future Bruno will be invited to return to Madeira in order to make, alongside Alexandre, other drivers and the organizers, a pedagogic campaign so that everyone understands that these actions puts the drivers lifes at risk and the rally future in jeopardy.