ERC: Acropolis Rally / Rally review
28/42
Dust to dust
For the final day of the rally the action
returned to the familiar gravel. Punishing as these stages are, we were expecting to be in for a few surprises.
They did not really materialize though.
Up front Craig Breen kept his cool and
did a perfect job of defending his lead.
He never lead by much, just over 20
seconds max, but never let Bouffier or
Kajetanowicz get close enough to become a real threat. The fact that Bouffier and Kajetanowicz were duking it
out for second makes it all the more impressive. At the finish Breen was both
d elighted and relieved “I can’t describe
it. It’s been the perfect weekend. We
didn’t really know what to expect when
we came here. Of course we have
done a lot of kilometers in the car over
the last year but rally cars have a habit
when you put the stickers on of doing
this you don’t expect.“ He is right on
that one, as Kevin Abbring’s car clearly
did not perform as hoped, but still, finishing one out of two brand new cars is
not bad and winning on a car’s debut is
nothing short of spectacular!
Best of the rest
Behind Breen the fight for second was
well on between Bouffier and Kajetanowicz. As Bouffier is former regular of
the Polish championship, the two have
met many times before in tight battles
and knew very well of each other what
they were capable of. This knowledge
eventually decided the battle. Trading
stage wins between each other the
second place went back and forth between the two. That was until the second loop of stages commenced and
Bouffier showed a skill all too familiar
to Kajetanowicz. “We know Bryan is
very fast on the second lap.” And indeed Bouffier was very fast, expanding
his lead over Kajetanowicz to well over
half a minute in just two stages. He was
so fast that he even gave Breen a fright
as he neared the Irisman to just 8 seconds. In fourth Esapekka Lappi had a
rather uneventful rally as he was unable to match the pace on the fast asphalt stages of day one and could not
fight back on the gravel either. Fourth
than provided a solid result.