Deutschland rally 2016

[Hartusvuori]

Back home from Trier. Feeling tired a lot after long day yesterday, it starting from leaving Panzerplatte after 8PM on Saturday, having a short sleep, early to Dhrontal and after the stages to airport, just to sit in a plane almost two hours waiting for it to be fixed... Because rallying.

Anyway, fifth consecutive visit to Rallye Deutschland. This year our journey focused solely on the event, no roadtrip prior to event, just straight from the airport to recce SS Freisen. We landed in on Tuesday morning and did Freisen, Bosenberg and Sauertal on Tuesday. On Wednesday we did the vineyard stages Mittelmosel, Dhrontal and Moselland in a row and shakedown and Ollmuth later on. Vineyard stages are quite slow to recce, especially Moselland this year as there were now sign post (taken out after recce) and it took too much map reading to be really able to focus on the stage. We have done several stages on prior years, but never in this extent. We picked up some interesting points balancing on preferences of crash potential and interesting sections to take photos. Afterwards, I should've picked faster points to spectate, actually only super fast as 3rd gear or any lower are very boring to spectate in Germany. Still learning...

The most spectacular place I did was already on shakedown, the super fast left with haybale and several hoooot moments. Soon the stage was stopped due to spectator emergency. That brought a dark cloud over the mood. Things like this just happen, though. Near the end of shakedown I walked to the corner where Abbring hit the curb last year, but it was cleaner this year.

After the shakedown the traditional stop over at service park. It've turned to more commercial over the past few years with more promotional lounges and activities for visitors. I found this positive - manufacturers hopefully feel they get return on their investments. Seeing factory cars being prepared has been made distant, but anything else is still close and intimate. Met some friends and drivers, made it nice stop. Later in the evening we joined the ceremonial start behind Porta Nigra, chatting with several drivers, all happy to stop for a few questions.

I won't go stage by stage, to keep the story short. On Friday we did three stages, on Saturday four stages and on Sunday three stages. Clearly in common with all places was that there were not much other spectators, or at all. On Mittelmosel 1 I hid behind bushes in an absolutely safe place at the corner where Maurin went off. Marshalls must've felt what the f*** when I jumped out of nowhere with tow rope :-) However, cars in vineyard hillsides are extremely heavy to pull back, we would've need two ropes and 20-25 men, and as marshalls were not helping out, Maurin's rally ended there. Marshalls did not (added) even knew how to warn cars properly.

On Ollmuth, the spectator stage, we were on forest right with two of us, two marshalls 30 metres away and two other spectators 60 metres away. Nice and quiet, except cool soundscape with a lot of cars coming regularly. I liked the concept. Same in Power Stage, it was just us and two locals. And we didn't chose place because they would be far from other spectators, it just happened.

Other stages we did were Freisen and Panzerplatte twice and Dhrontal twice. Two cancelled stages were of course disappointing, but things like that happen. I think there were somewhat less people this year. No traffic jams, no spectators on dangerous places apart from few. Sense of safety was far higher than in previous years for me.

I mentioned the need for speed on spectating places earlier. I can't grab why the sense of speed seems lacking from spectator experience. It does not when you are on 5th or 6th gear place, but practically everything slower just doesn't do it for me. On onboards and some fan videos however the speed is definitely there. In short, I should've stayed on vineyards straights rather than anything else.

Competition wise it clearly wasn't all clear for Ogier to grab this. He's specializing on Panzerplatte, though Sordo and Neuville were not that far behind. Everyone else though - let's check the difference from calendar. Big shame Latvala couldn't do one clean stage before retiring. On Rally2 he was not really going anywhere. Lack of WRC crews were just sad. It was over all so soon. WRC2 field had a strong entry, but on stages it was a Kopecky show. Lappi, Suninen, Suarez (had not checked his times, but liked his approach) and Kremer were nice to watch too. Few good crews had an early retirements, so it flattened the race. In general I would've wanted one or two up and coming stars late in the field to be waiting for. Griebel and Tannert were such, but for example DDFT or OAC had no such effect for me this year.

Although I've been bitching here a bit, Rallye Deutschland is very nice event, ever-so well-organised, interesting to due to different character of stages and surfaces, weather changes and small margins for error. The planned change for next year propably takes nothing or not much away from that. New stages are always welcomed!