The event took place on fast gravel roads around the city of Lahti, just to the south of those used on the previous weekend’s Rally Finland in Jyväskylä. Both days of the rally on Friday and Saturday featured a loop of three stages run twice, forming a total of around 154 competitive kilometres.

Although not part of this year’s Finnish Rally Championship, the event did attract several regular competitors from the series. This gave Yamamoto, Otake and Kogure the chance to measure their progress relative to drivers they competed against on the Pohjanmaa Ralli in June when they contested their first event on Finnish soil.

Unlike on the Pohjanmaa Ralli, the drivers could enjoy consistently warm and dry conditions, and all three made a considerable step forward in their Renault Clio Rally4 cars to match the speed of the fastest local drivers in similar machinery.

Otake and co-driver Marko Salminen made the strongest start of the three crews on Friday, and completed the opening day in third overall. Yamamoto, co-driven by Miika Teiskonen, was 5.7 seconds back in sixth, and then impressed on the second day to take an outright stage win in SS9 and climb to third overall. He finished only 5.4s away from the leading two-wheel drive car, with Otake just 1.8s further behind.

After making a slightly more cautious start on Friday morning’s first two stages, Kogure was able to set a similarly strong pace to his team-mates thereafter as he moved up to sixth overall by the finish with his co-driver Topi Luhtinen.

Quotes:
Hikaru Kogure:“This rally went well for me. I could have a good rhythm in the stages. I’m not completely satisfied with the result, but I’m definitely happy with the progress made since the previous rally, especially with the pacenotes. At first I was struggling with hard braking from long straights into tight apex corners, so I lost quite a lot of time there. But I could feel it getting better and better during the event, and hopefully next time I can be quicker from stage one.”

Nao Otake:“This was quite a nice rally as we had good speed the whole weekend. We made good progress since the first rally in terms of the pacenotes and speed and just in the way that we did the whole rally. We drove each stage four times in the recce so we had nice pacenotes, and a good collaboration with Marko. The most difficult thing was to see the correct line through the corners, because we were a long way down the running order with many historic cars in front who drove with a tighter line, so this was hard to judge.”

Yuki Yamamoto:“This rally has been very good for me because we had some nice improvement from our first event in Finland. On many stages we could fight with the Finnish Rally4 drivers, and we could take a stage win. I think the biggest improvement came on the pacenote side, as they were much more precise and I could trust all the information in them. On this event the recce was unlimited so we drove each stage four times and I could remember them quite well. But usually in the Finnish championship we are only allowed two runs, so that will be more challenging on future events.”

Mikko Hirvonen (TOYOTA GAZOO Racing WRC Challenge Program chief instructor):“This was a really good weekend, maybe even better than we were expecting. The drivers were able to show consistently very good pace, which was really impressive. On the first day the stages were quite straightforward – very fast with lots of straights – and then the second day had some of the most technical roads Finland has to offer; still fast but going over crests and turning all the time, with no time to rest. We thought that might be more challenging, especially in terms of the pacenotes, but we saw no real drop-off in performance compared to the Finnish drivers. Yuki and Nao were consistent from the beginning, and even when fighting with their rivals and each other they kept their heads and didn’t make mistakes. Hikaru could also find his confidence and do very similar times, which was really good, and it’s nice to see that all three are so equally matched as we move forward with the Program.”