WRC Rally Mexico 2019

[PLuto]

All Live just showed the points for WRC2Pro (embarrassing as it is), they'd only given Pieniazek 12 points, not adding his 25 points for the win here... Probably spiritually correct anyway!

Maybe they want to give him only half of the points as he has used superally?

[mknight]

About penalty for Evans. The rule says that you have to run the PS "in a given order" so TC penalties don't matter since he started in correct order.

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Interesting points from the rally:

- starting to look like driver championship will be two man fight. Question is how C3 does in the events where it kind of struggled last year (Arg, Por, Sard, Turkey etc...). Neuville can't keep up if he can't fight on tarmac and has to write-off Finland beforehand.
(then again last year after Corsica it looked like we will have Ogier domination)

- Toyota (both Tanak and others), just didn't seem to have the extra speed it has showed in last 6 months or so. Did others catch up or was it just Mexico altitude? I am thinking altitude, Toyota could have "fixed" overheating the way other teams were rumored to do in 2017 => by just turning down the power

- Meeke as a reliable point scorer that can't regularly fight in top (both overall and stagetimes) is something totally new.

- there are 3 drivers that have had really bad season start. Funnily enough there is one from each team: Suninen, Latvala, Lappi and Mikkelsen.
Suninen had top3 speed in Sweden, ok speed in monte, crashed in each rally, 2x in first stage
Latvala had top3 speed in Sweden, quite bad in Monte and slowest Toyota, also mostly slowest Toyota here, 1x out on his own, 1x technical
Lappi ok ish speed in Monte, very good speed in Sweden, not very fast here. Small crash in Monte (then technical), massive luck in Sweden, luck here as well on Friday (hitting the tree mid-car saved him) then crash with "small" mistake
Mikkelsen fighting in top 3 on all rallies (though in Sweden it was mostly due to being stable), crash in Monte, puncture-related retirement here

[TypeR]

Maybe they want to give him only half of the points as he has used superally?

the rule should be that one can't get any championship points unless there are at least 5 competitors per class. atm the case is that, he had money to waste on going to Mexico and get the ,,win''..
although, being only one in PRO class, he still couldn't handle it and had to use re-start

[Indreq]

I think that very broadly there were 3 tire scenarios for last 3 stages.
1. All mediums and push like hell - you risk tire overheating and surely have nothing left for PS. Evans probably followed this scenario. Latvalas tires showed us what happened to mediums there, Evans must have had even worse.
2. All mediums and save for PS - what most guys did to a degree, Meeke most of them.
3. All hards and have tires for all 3 stages even at max speed - what Tänak did. But i think even he knew that he wont have same grip at PS as those guys who had been saving mediums. But over 3 stages, it enabled him to do best overall time. His chance on PS might have been if mediums had severely overheated under other cars but i guess it didnt happen this time.

So probably calculated strategy by Tänak to secure 2nd and give up few points on PS which would have been hard to win anyway, considering that several other guys could afford to save tires.

[Fast Eddie WRC]

Another win in Mexico... No.5 :

[Fast Eddie WRC]

Kris Meeke
On the way to the finish, a great job from @sebmarshall on his 50th WRC start this weekend. 6th in Sweden, 5th in Mexico, if we keep that up we should win @rallydeportugal

[Morte66]

Kris Meeke
On the way to the finish, a great job from @sebmarshall on his 50th WRC start this weekend. 6th in Sweden, 5th in Mexico, if we keep that up we should win @rallydeportugal

I will look forward to it.

[Rally Power]

Top 3 separated by 10 points. The season sure has started the way last one ended.

Yep, and only 9 between top 3 manus. Runing order rule may not be fair but it surely helps keeping the series exciting.

Btw, fantastic PS show on a rather poor rally. Runing events with only 20 entries and basic organizational mistakes is damaging to the series; the FIA and the promoter must realize it’s impossible to create a real interest for the sport in low tradition rally countries. It’s time to stop wasting European rallys and look for quality events elsewhere, like NZ.

[eib1]

Ott and Martin seem very disappointed

puncture at ps

[EstWRC]

first interview in finally with Tänak after rally and he had puncture on power stage, 7km before the end. That explains why he looked disappointed but says he is very satisfied with the second place and its a very good result.