Quote Originally Posted by EstWRC View Post
Not just for Portugal but for all rallies. I wrote about it in Dmacks topic. But we will see tomorrow, times were very good today.

The Hyundai seems to be very good car at the moment. Usually VW had 1-2-3 on street stages but hasn't been the case in last two rallies. I think this is gonna be hard rally for Paddon, big expectations for him
I hope Dmack has some very good tires for this weekend (if we judge by Tänaks "poker face" it is going to be interesting.)

Regarding Paddon:
The original plan was to do A LOT of work towards Portugal, especially since the stages are the same which makes it easier to compare, but everything went a bit crazy after the victory - with him even meeting the prime minister - so the time we had planned to use for preperations was taken up by PR assignments etc. The same went for Rally Whangarei which we were going to use as preperation for Portugal, but you cant really complain about these things when the cause is Hayden Paddons and New Zealands first WRC victory.
Regarding Hayden in Portugal the aim is to continue to improve. He lost a lot of time on almost every stage here last year, but a lot has happened since then, and it will be interesting to see how the general work on the "base line" will affect his performance.
Hayden is an amazing driver in many respects, and his ability to take theoretical information and turn it in to changes in practice is amazing, so tough the preparations towards Portugal has been "hampered by success", it will be very interesting to see what kind of progress he will make compared to last year.

I think and hope this rally will be very interesting, with several drivers charging for victory. Regarding Argentina I am off course biased, but I think every rally fan loved that it was a duell all the way to the end, so lets hope that Ogier will have his work cut out on this event too!