ERC: Rally Liepaja / Rally review
Juniors
Behind the top flight boys, the young guns participating in the ERC
Junior Championship put in an equally spectacular performance.
No less than six different drivers took stage wins in four different
car makes. In the end it was the Czech Jan Cerny who took the
spoils and finished an impressive tenth overall, placing his underpowered 2WD Peugeot 208R2 firmly between a Lancer Evo X and
a Fiesta R5. Not bad at all! Risto Immonen (Citroen C2) and Petter Kristianson (Skoda Fabia R2) completed the junior podium. It’s
great to see these young guys entangled in such close fights on the
stages, proving there is a lot more ‘Serious Competition Ahead’ in
the future.
36/42
The ERC Junior victory went to Czech Jan Cerny after a good fight.
(No) Ice Master
The second round of the ERC
was also the second round of the
ERC Ice Master challenge. Due
to the cancellation of the third
and final round of the series,
Sibiu Rally Romania, the trophy would be decided right here
in Latvia. This was somewhat
of an anticlimax as drivers can
score points on each stage and
the other qualifying round was
the Jännerrallye which boosted
18 stages compared to Liepaja’s
12. This made it impossible for
anyone who had not competed
in Austria to overhaul challenge
leader Robert Kubica as he had
already scored 122 points and a
maximum of 120 point were to
be gained in Latvia. This left Ka-
jetan Kajetanowicz as the only
(somewhat) serious threat, but
he would have to score a whopping 87 points out of 120. In the
end the Pole only managed to
add 23 points to his tally leaving him in fifth overall. Rally winner Esapekka Lappi scored a
healthy 93 points to move up to
third overall but could not compete with the Jännerrallye’s top
scorers of Kubica and Pech who
finished first and second respectively in the challenge standings. A disappointing end than
to an interesting idea, although
of course there was nothing the
ERC organizers could do about
the downpours in Romania that
caused the cancellation of the
event.