Date: 8/9/2023
Day: 2
Flash N°: 7
Service: A (Lamia)

#69 Kalle ROVANPERÄ / Jonne HALTTUNEN
“It is always a bit more stressful with the changes on the road, not really knowing how rough some places are. I don’t know what the conditions are in tomorrow stages, we hope it’s going to be better for us. Anyway we didn’t lose so much time, now it’s important to drive well tomorrow”.

#33 Elfyn EVANS / Scott MARTIN
“Definitely better conditions than we expected, especially in this last one. It dried a lot in the afternoon. Clearly we were too much on the cautious side for most of the day. We have to keep the pressure on tomorrow, but this rally is long, there is a lot of driving still in very difficult conditions”.

#11 Thierry NEUVILLE/ Martijn WYDAEGHE
“We had a problem with the transmission, I couldn’t go full throttle, we were constantly losing time, I was struggling a lot. It was a challenging stage, I was worried that I wouldn’t make it to the end. The difficult part will be to make the right tyre choice for tomorrow, because we have no way to react tomorrow morning, so we have to make a choice tonight. It’s not what rally should be like”.

#8 Ott TÄNAK / Martin JÄRVEOJA
“It is not nice to be in this situation, but actually it was not too bad. But we had to fix the problem, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to continue”.

#17 Sebástien OGIER / Vincent LANDAIS
“It’s been a good day for us. The big day is tomorrow, very long stages and most probably the conditions will improve. So far so good, but nothing done yet. It was not very easy, but luckily the sun was pretty much there, the road drying quickly, there were a couple of surprises, but not so bad. The plan is always to fight for the win, at the moment it is too early to think about victory or anything, I’ll try to drive as fast as I can and win the rally”.

#4 Esapekka LAPPI / Janne FERM
“When we came to the start line of SS4 we saw the low water pressure, we managed to find the problem with the radiator, but couldn’t actually fix it. Since that it’s been leaking all the time and we had to add a couple of liters after every 20 km. I struggled with the conditions today, we tried to maximize the grip, but it’s always a compromise with the suspension, how the car is behaving”.

#18 Takamoto KATSUTA / Aaron JOHNSTON
“The stages have changed; we had a lot of moments, there have been many surprises. We couldn’t do the testing, and that was not good for my confidence, of course. I have no idea how tomorrow’s stages will be like, hopefully the conditions will improve”.

#6 Daniel SORDO / Cándido CARRERA
“It was so difficult to know where the muddy places are, stages have changed a lot compared to the Recce. I stalled the engine and lost 10 sec. in the last stage. Apart from this, our pace was not far away from the others’ and also the cleaning effect was not so big”.

#9 Jourdan SERDERIDIS / Frederic MICLOTTE
“The Recce was very tricky, now it’s going much better; each stage, each hour it’s getting better, so it’s about taking more risk in some places where it’s drying. I think I was too cautious in some stages and when I was trying to attack I lost the brakes and lost a lot of time. We also had some issues with the engine since yesterday and I hope we fix it tonight”.