The Finn, who stepped up to the top class this season, will now get behind the wheel of a Rally1 car in the Canary Islands for the WRC event. It marks the first full tarmac rally of the season.
Pajari has emphasised that this season is primarily a learning journey for him to understand the demands of the top category, and he will approach the fourth round of the season, which begins on Friday morning, with the same mindset.
“The basic idea is the same as in all previous rallies. No heroics, but I’ll try to drive in a way that feels right to me. Here, the best result might not come from pushing hard and taking risks,” Pajari told RallyJournal.
“I’ll just try to keep the driving clean and aim to find a good rhythm,” the Finn planned.
The new tyre manufacturer Hankook, which joined the WRC this season, will have its tarmac tyres seriously tested in the Canary Islands. The rally features long stages, and one of the biggest questions ahead of the event is how well the tyres will hold up under such conditions.
“I do believe they’ll be sufficient,” Pajari said.
“We’ll just have to see how the grip holds up. The stages here are relatively long, and the road sections are twisty enough that the tyre temperatures probably won’t drop much even there,” Pajari pondered.
This brings us back to one of the core elements of motorsport. The one who manages the tyres best will likely have the upper hand in the rally.
“We’ll see who gets it right — knowing when to push and when to back off a bit,” Pajari said.
While the European Rally Championship has visited the Canary Islands before, for most WRC drivers, the event is entirely new. There’s no point digging out old pace notes — they simply don’t exist.
“Maybe that doesn’t matter much for me,” Pajari pointed out.
“I still have a good memory of the approach where you go into each rally fresh and make new notes. But I like going to a new rally. It makes you think about things differently. It’s actually quite fun,” he continued.
There’s no such thing as a “perfect note,” but a tarmac rally does make the note-taking process a bit more difficult. There’s hardly any room for error in recce.
“In tarmac rallies, you’re always working with very fine margins. If a corner is even slightly too gentle in the notes, the car can end up in the barrier rather quickly. At these speeds and with these cars, if your line is even ten centimetres too wide, you might not be able to recover it at all,” Pajari warned.
