HYAcenter Ralli is often used as preparation for the fastest rally in the world championship, Rally Finland, by many teams and drivers. This year’s entry included TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team driver Elfyn Evans.

After their debut on Finnish roads during Pohjanmaa Ralli in June, HYAcenter Ralli was another step up for both third-generation TOYOTA GAZOO Racing WRC Challenge Program drivers: the event’s fast but technical roads with lots of crests and jumps increased the challenge further from their campaign debuts in June. Several roads featured on the itinerary based out of Tampere have been part of Finland’s WRC route in previous decades.

Matsushita and Goto started the rally with the longest stage of their career to date, the 22.94-kilometre Kehro test. Unlike Pohjanmaa Ralli, HYAcenter Ralli featured the same three stages run twice before a final standalone stage, meaning both drivers got to fully experience the effects of road cleaning – an important learning opportunity on the pathway towards becoming professional rally drivers.

Importantly, both drivers not only finished the rally but did so while finding the limit: though Matsushita had few moments during the day his strong performance led to a maiden podium finish in rallying. Goto also found a good rhythm and finished right behind his team-mate, scoring fourth place in class.

Quotes:
Shotaro Goto:
“There were a lot of positives from this rally; we learned a lot. We had three stages repeated, being able to conduct a second pass and understanding the difference in the surface between each run of the stage was a very good learning opportunity. Compared to Pohjanmaa, there were many more jumps and crests but I was happy with my pace; overall I was less than 1 second per kilometre from the pace of the class leader. I was especially pleased with my fifth stage, where I had a very good rhythm and finished only 3.9 seconds away from the class leader. I’ll keep pushing to learn more.”

Takumi Matsushita:
“This rally was quite challenging for me because of how many jumps and crests the road had, which made this rally very different to our first in Pohjanmaa. Considering how fast but technical the stages are, this rally was a really good way to practice writing notes and then fully committing to them on the stages – we have already improved the accuracy of our notes compared to Pohjanmaa, which meant I had good confidence in many stages. The next target is to make the notes even more aggressive; as I’m still learning my notes are quite conservative, so I’m building that step by step.”

Mikko Hirvonen (TOYOTA GAZOO Racing WRC Challenge Program chief instructor):
“Both Takumi and Shotaro drove really well. The stages were really challenging; very technical, proper rally roads. It was very demanding to craft the pace notes and find a good rhythm as well. There were small mistakes here and there but that’s part of the learning process. Compared to other drivers in their class, both Takumi and Shotaro improved their pace across the rally extremely well: one of the next steps will be to make the most of using cleaner roads on the second pass of stages to improve their times. It’s still only their second rally so we didn’t have no specific expectations for results – it’s about finding a strong flow and rhythm while still reaching the finish line – and they achieved this here in Tampere.”