WRC Italy
[ June 16th, 2008 ] By: Mark Ozimek Posted in » Ramblings
I finally got the time to watch EuroSport’s coverage of the WRC Italy race, well the review of it at least. As Charles pointed out the other day, Rally isn’t the most spectator friendly sport, since the race occurs over so much distance, and takes up a lot of time due to everyone racing against the clock instead of next to each other like most other motor sports. As a result, most people only have the time to watch the highlights of every race. Now I need to watch the races that were in Greece and Turkey.
A funny thing about rally races is how much effort it takes to stay in the lead. After the first day, the two Subaru cars were doing quite well, but by the end of the second day, Solberg had some unknown issues, like he often does, and Atkinson just wasn’t keeping up with the pace, and just like that, Subaru is basically out of the running. Atkinson ended up in 6th overall.
Loeb managed to win the event, as he has been doing quite often lately. The combination of his driving skills, the partnership between him and his co-driver, and the reliability of the Citroën car seems to work out to get him on the podium pretty consistently.
Also putting in a solid effort are Hirvonen and Latava. Ford has been dominating the top 10 in the recent WRC events with sheer numbers, getting four of the top 10 places. It is quite amazing how many Ford teams are competing this year. I’m not going to complain though, since this much involvement from an American car company can only be a good thing for bringing the sport here to the USA.
So if you haven’t watched the Italian WRC yet, I recommend doing so, it was a pretty exciting race in a fairly tough course. A few large jumps and rather bumpy terrain puts a lot of strain on the suspension, and there are the typical crashes and component failure that goes with the car abuse that is known as rally racing. Definitely good times to be had by all!
