DH: First stage had a lot more grip than
I expected, but we didn’t push quite that
hard and lost a bit of time. But the second stage
we made up quite a lot of time and we are making
some setup changes to the car, so we should fair
well on the second set of stages.
DH: I’m going with a
slightly different tire choice for the next
two stages and we are changing the springs and
damper settings on the car.
DH: First 20k of the first
stage were very tight and twisty with quite
a lot of grip in the snow then it opened up
to a wide road with sheets of ice and even some
gravel.
DH: We are running first on
the road, and while we were sitting at the start
of the 2nd stage we didn’t know it was
live yet, and then suddenly the start workers
gave us a 5 second countdown…we were not
ready and it caught us by surprise, so we did
the first few corners without the diffs or anti-lag
turned on. So for the first part of that stage
we lost some time while we scrambled to get
everything turned on.
LO: Wrong tire choice on those
stages…we were on an intermediate snow/ice
and should have been on an ice tire. We just
had no grip on the icy sections.
LO: First two stages were
very interesting. First stage we caught the
car ahead of us maybe 10k in, we passed by him
shifted into 4th gear and there was nothing
there! Soon after we hit a snow bank, not too
hard but we damaged the bumper a bit.
LO: It was tough without 4th
gear, you really needed it on that stage, so
we lost a lot of time. I thought we had lost
the gear but it was simply a gear linkage problem,
and we fixed it here at the first service.
LO: Special thanks to Yves
Barbe, driving an Eagle Talon TSI, after we
passed him on the first stage he hit a snow
bank and lost a lot of time, like 8 minutes
or something. He is running ahead of us on the
road and so on the next stage instead of him
running ahead of us and having us catch him
and pass him like the first stage he elected
to take a 10 second penalty and let us start
the stage in front of him. Another 10 seconds
on top of 8 minutes really wouldn’t make
a difference, and it was much safer and easier
not having to pass him… Thanks Yves!
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