Rovanperä was flown to Poland on short notice on Tuesday after his teammate, Sébastien Ogier, was involved in a head-on collision during reconnaissance earlier that day. Ogier was eventually hospitalised overnight for observation and had to withdraw from the competition entirely, resulting in the abrupt end of Rovanperä’s holiday.
While the other WRC stars were making pace notes as usual on Tuesday and Wednesday, and had the opportunity to watch videos of the Rally Poland stages before the race week, Rovanperä arrived in Poland late on Tuesday evening without any prior preparation. He and his co-driver Jonne Halttunen spent the entire Wednesday making pace notes for the special stages.
By Thursday morning, they were already in action at the shakedown.
“Our testing is this five-kilometre (shakedown) we did now. Yesterday, we had 14 hours of recceing in the stages and no videos at all. It’s not so easy,” Rovanperä said.
Rovanperä’s first run at the shakedown immediately showed how challenging the competition ahead would be for him.
“Already here I hit some bales at the junction because when we went through it in the recce in the evening, it was already full of fans. So I had no idea how the bales would be,” Rovanperä admitted.
“We are here anyway. Let’s hope we can help the team a bit and let’s see what happens.”
Rovanperä finished his first run of the shakedown in seventh place. Despite the minor mistake, he was only 2.8 seconds behind the fastest time set by Ott Tänak.
Hyundai’s star Tänak beat Toyota’s Elfyn Evans by 0.7 seconds on the first run. Hyundai’s Andreas Mikkelsen was third fastest, and M-Sport Ford’s Gregoire Munster was fourth.
The shakedown for Rally Poland concludes for the top drivers at 12:30 CET. The competition officially starts on Thursday evening with a short super special special stage.
