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Bad luck and technical problems
Home win yet to come
He was forced to retire from the race the following day when the left front
wheel failed in Ouninpohja stage and the car, no longer steerable, went
off. Inside the team the matter has been analyzed and counted as bad
luck, but also Marcus Grönholm’s retirement was caused by a wheel
bearing trouble and Richard Burns was slowed down by one minute for
the same reason. In Australia from the 3rd to the 7th of September, the
Finnish drivers of Peugeot are sure to thirst for a win! 
In the lead for a moment on Friday and then a snap!
- the bolt of the suspension arm was broken amazingly easily
Harri Rovanperä and Risto Pietiläinen of Peugeot, counted among the
favorites prior to the event, were only 0,9 seconds slower than the fastest
crew on Thursday night’s super special in Killeri. On the second stage of
the rally (SS 2, Jukojärvi 1, 22,3 km), opening Friday morning, Rovanperä
had already moved into the lead until, some 12 kilometers from the start,
he lost about twenty minutes making repairs to his car. The official time
keeping of Peugeot showed Rovanperä being two seconds faster then
the others at the six-kilometer point. Unofficially, he was clocked at ten
kilometers 5 to 6 seconds ahead of the others, but then Rovanperä’s
hope of winning his home event came to nothing. 12 kilometers into the
stage, there was a downhill right hand curve where the bolt of the lower
arm of the right front wheel of Rovanperä’s car snapped, causing him to
spin and end up backwards into the opposite bank.
Rovanperä was once again able to do little miracles to his car and got it
good enough to continue. His stage time was however 20 minutes slower
than for the rest of the top drivers. Arriving late to the start of stage 3,
Rovanperä got a time penalty of 1 minute 20 seconds and was dropped
down four places from his initial eighth road position, going between Toni
Gardemeister and Mikko Hirvonen.
Rovanperä and Pietiläinen had yet to survive the next stage (SS 3,
Kruununperä 1, 20,2 km) with their limping car before the service break.
The car handling very badly, they struggled through the stage two and a
half minutes slower than the fastest.
There wasn’t quite enough time before the following stage (SS 4, Valkola,
8,4 km) to fix the car completely, but Rovanperä was nevertheless able to
clock the sixth fastest time there, as well as on the next long stage (SS 5,
Lankamaa, 23,5 km). On the sixth stage (SS 6, Laukaa, 11,8 km) he
finished eighth. On the last, rainy stage of the loop around Laukaa (SS 7,
Ruuhimäki, 7,5 km), he made it only 11th. On the reruns of the dramatic
stages of the morning (SS 8, Jukojärvi 2, 22,3 km and SS 9, Kruununperä
2, 20,2 km), Rovanperä posted the ninth fastest times and in Killeri he
was tenth, a mere 0,6 seconds behind the stage winner.
- It would be nice to have some luck for a change. The rally was spoilt in
the morning already when the bolt of a lower arm failed in Jukojärvi,
Rovanperä agonized after Friday’s leg. – It was marked in our pace notes
to go right over the crest and hold, so there wasn’t supposed to be
anything peculiar there. We just saw the in-car film of that spot with
people from our team. The pace note was totally OK, I think, and we were
driving in the same line as all the rest. We weren’t even on the bank of the
ditch at that point. We just have to call it bad luck. But of course, it isn’t
much of a comfort that the team doesn’t consider it a mistake from my
part, because the rally is ruined in any case.
- The car was being repaired throughout the day, so we couldn’t fully rely
on it yet on the Laukaa loop. And, naturally, the motivation wasn’t really
there to go on with the competition, but we decided anyway to try and bring
the car to the finish of the rally, Rovanperä said.
Saturday: the car fixed, speeding up…
- left front suspension failed in Ouninpohja
Harri Rovanperä and Risto Pietiläinen took the start on Saturday’s leg
right behind the first fifteen cars, so they had a good position. The
Peugeot team had managed to fix Rovanperä’s car well enough, as on
the first stage of Saturday (SS 11, Päijälä, 22 km), Rovanperä drove at the
same pace with the top, being third fastest right behind his team mate
Marcus Grönholm and Ford’s Markko Märtin who was leading the rally
with a minimal margin. Rovanperä lost 2,8 seconds to Grönholm and 0,9
seconds to Märtin. Rovanperä beat his team mate Richard Burns, fourth
fastest of the stage, by 2,3 seconds.
- We had clear instructions to bring the car over the finish line and thus we
were just making a safe drive, so we were as surprised as anybody by the
time we clocked. And we had the same goal when going onto the
following stage, because we were getting confidence in the reliability of
the car again, the co-driver Risto Pietiläinen described the feelings after
the opening stage of Saturday morning.
The next stage (Ouninpohja 1, 33,2 km) was very pleasing to Rovanperä,
for he had posted the fastest time there the previous year. Nominated by
the drivers of the world championship series as “the most challenging
special stage”, Ouninpohja was to prove harsh for its former conqueror.
After just a few kilometers, Rovanperä went off and his rally was over.
About three kilometers into the stage, the car jumped and when it landed,
it bobbed in a strange way pulling the front slightly to the left. The car
seemed to move on the right line but it never turned to the right the way it
was supposed to, finally hitting the left bank instead. In an amateur video
film one can see the left front wheel sticking out in a bizarre position, so
something in the front suspension must have broken at the landing after
the jump.
- I must say I don’t have a clue about what happened there, but obviously
something was broken in that jump. Spectators said the left front wheel
was in a strange position after the jump, and that’s how it felt to me, too,
like the wheel was getting loose. The car didn’t turn at all at the next right
hand corner, and we bumped into the bank so hard that it was all over for
us. In fact, our competition was already ruined on Friday, but we thought
we’d drive to the finish anyhow, and the time we clocked in Päijälä gave
us some motivation and confidence in the car. And then this happened, a
disappointed Rovanperä fretted after the rally.
Success on home ground difficult but not impossible
For Finns, their home rally has proved difficult to conquer. Harri
Rovanperä, who took his 11th Jyväskylä start, had to accept the bitter fact
that, for him, the Finnish round of world rally championship was over
before it really started. It wasn’t much of a comfort for him to know that
Juha Kankkunen managed to win on his home ground only at his 11th try
and also Marcus Grönholm had to wait for a victory until his 12th home
event.
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