Rally Argentina: Day 2Latvala and Hänninen in the points on tough first full day of Argentina

Quotes:
Tommi Mäkinen (Team Principal)

“Like many people said, today was a bit more like the Dakar Rally in Argentina rather than the WRC Rally in Argentina! However, the Yaris WRC showed its strength by getting to the finish of the day with both cars pretty much intact, even though we had a number of small problems, which we can now solve and learn from. On a rally like this you have to be clever, and both drivers have managed the tricky conditions to the best of their abilities, despite some bad luck. It’s especially difficult because the conditions on the recce were very different to how they are now on the rally.”

Jari-Matti Latvala (Driver car 10)

“I was surprised by how rough it was right from the very first stage: we hit the sump guard hard in about five places, so I knew it was going to be tough. In the afternoon conditions were even rougher, with all the cars having already passed through the stage once, so we raised our car to play safe. This set-up was definitely safer, but I didn’t feel so confident with it. On stage eight we were avoiding a rock, went wide, and put the tyre off the rim. There were about 15 kilometres to go and we drove on the rim to the finish, which is where we lost the time. That was bad luck, but at least we are still here and ready to improve some more over the next challenging two days.”

Juho Hänninen (Driver car 11)

“It was really rough all day, which meant that you focussed simply on getting through the stages. In the morning, we had a power loss, which cost us a bit of time, but we were able to find the problem and fix it at service easily. Then we had no issues for the rest of the day. In the morning, we also lost part of the aero package over the bumps: it made the handling quite tricky but it was still OK. Tomorrow, we will hopefully be able to make up some more places: this is definitely a rally of endurance.”

Topics:

One of the typical features of Rally Argentina is the number of watersplashes, which vary in depth and complexity. To negotiate them in the best possible way, drivers tend to accelerate just before they hit the watersplash, in order to keep the nose of the car as high as possible and avoid sucking in water. The co-driver also operates a flap to temporarily shut off the air intake. If the nose of the car is too low, then water can still get into the engine: many drivers have been caught out by this in the past.

What’s next?

Saturday is the longest day of the rally with 160 competitive kilometres. These are distributed over two loops of three stages, with service in Villa Carlos Paz between the two loops. The drivers set off from parc ferme at 07:20, returning to service in the evening just after 17:00.