Another day of travelling again. Trip to home is always nice and especially after very good rally it is nice to go home. At the moment I´m sitting in the train, 1.5 hours anymore left of total 18 hours travelling.

Rally Japan went very well from all of us. After bad rally like Finland was it is very important to get good rally for me. Self confidence is again back. It is little weard but always after bad rally next rally start is more difficult. We didn´t had any single trouble on whole rally. Fcaca WRT and Autotek guys did a great job with the car. It was very good to see that even under the pressure of Championship ending Team has developed again and proven the reliability of our Fiesta S2000.

Rally itself was very hard for the car because road conditions was very bad. After I was there 2008 I could expect bad roads. Some stages were on extremely bad conditions but some stages handled very well. Even we had a good lead right after Friday we still needed to be fast enough to keep cap between us and Prokop on same.

Rally Japan is very unique event. Japanese rally Fans are extremely enthuastic and there are lot of them. What is very surprising is that they normally are always on road sections and in service area. At the stages there just very few of people looking the cars. I think they are more interested of seeing drivers faces, not to see cars passing them fast. It is very very different culture. It is amazing how easily they recognizes their favourite drivers. I was eating Sushi in very small restaurant on Wednesday evening and one man and small boy came to ask signing. It never happens anywhere else in the world. Also there was lot of people who had a small scale copies of my recent rallycars. Most of them was last years S12b car from Rally Finland. Ofcourse they wanted to have my signing in to their collections. Also there was some of 2008 Subaru Rally Team Japan´s N14 car. They looked nice and it nice to know that they are importand for some people.

Now we will have totally new challenge. Tarmac is still quite unknown area for me. I´m still confident for our performance there. We will do some preparing work week before France and then we make good test on Monday. For me it is just interesting. We know that we need to be good and everyone in team and myself are doing our best for the rest of the season.

See you at France on tarmac challenge !

Best regards,
Jari