Like I told before the event I was very excited to start to see how we will do on Tarmac. I was sure that if it is dry we have some more things to learn comparing to wet surfaces. Rally started very well, we were quite near to our main rivals right from the start. I knew that I need to go the speed what I feel comfortable. That is the only way how I could achieve good result. I didn´t had tarmac experience before so it is easy to make mistake and also easily you can try to achieve better time and take some risk on some stupid place. Our tactic for this rally was perfect. During the rally we find out that this is quite different tarmac rally. Already we found during the Recce that cars on front of us will cut the corners a lot. It meant that there will be a lot of grass, sand and mud on the road. I never couldn´t expect that there will be so much of dirt on the surface. I can say that I never haven´t been driving on so difficult conditions. Some corners we went with first gear and so slow what you can drive with the car but still it was impossible to stay on road… Can you imagine, we were on tarmac rally… In someway it was good for us. On totally dry conditions it might have been difficult to stay on speed what would have been needed to be on second at the end of the rally.

It was great to be driving in France. There were so many spectators on the route that I haven´t never seen anything like that. It was unfortunate that they were on dangerous places somewhere but luckily nothing bad didn´t happen. I think no one of organizers didn´t expect that amount of people to come to stages to see the rally cars. I think Mr. Loeb was a big reason for that. Rally France was a great show, like Rally Finland also. This kind of races we need more to championship! Just there are some points from our point where Rally France organization needs to be developed, I´m sure they will be better at the future.

Result from France was perfect. Now I can only concentrate to do my best on Rally Wales. Our gravel speed have been good so there is no doubt that we would not been able to fight to win the SWRC Championship. Still there is very very difficult and slippy rally coming. I will enjoy of it and I´m sure everyone will have very exciting weekend.

I will write again how our preparation for Wales will go ahead.

Best regards,
Jari