74th PZM Rally Poland

[mknight]

To be honest all the WR drivers are extremely talented and should get decent air time. Leferve should have also received some air time considering he was the fastest Citroen and his car did not inlude any jokers... that's an interesting story by itself.

True there were a lot of drivers that could at least get one-sentence mention. Lefevbre certainly could get mentioned for best result of the year and one of best Citroen results one rally after being dropped by the team. (should be interesting angle for brit. jurnos)

But the story about jokers is not especially interesting. The changes they did were supposed to make the car easier to control, not faster (i.e. not like they changed the engine or something). So you had Breen and Lefevbre driving a car they have been driving for half a year and testing for longer and Mikkelsen driving a "new" car where they didn't had chance to do any wet test/setup at all.
Btw. on Sardinia Ogier's car was suppoed to have some dif. upgrade which Tanak couldn't get... and Tanak won.

Wonder how many chances Hanninen has before he's on the cutting block. Does anyone think he can recover this late in that season? Will a few podiums secure his seat for next year?

No, too late, only thing that would save him now is 3x solid finishes (5th and up) in a row, that's something I see as virtually impossible. Lappi has been clearly faster than him in Sardinia and about same speed in Portugal, now in Poland even Suninen was faster. Not the mention 2 Citroens. Yes he had some technical issues but it's not like he was fast inbetween, for whole saturday and sunday best were 2 9th places.

It was quite a risk from Tommi in the first place, but Hanninen was available and had some wrc experience to complement Lappi and Sunninen (at that point). He will certainly let him drive rest of the rallies this year, but I do think somebody else will be signing a contract for that spot. Given what Latvala has shown with the car I totally can see better drivers than Hanninen being interested (Tanak, Mikkelsen, maybe even Ogier, + Suninen will likely be available).