Kalle Rovanpera says that it is not the best feeling for a driver to miss out the win by a small margin, but he is still happy with the points from Safari Rally revealing that his target was to drive with a good pace and to avoid the huge risks.
The reigning WRC Champion increased his championship leady by 12 points at the end of Safari Rally after his finishing second overall and taking four bonus points from Powerstage. Despite the fact that he was starting first on the road on Friday and had to clean the stages for the following drivers, generally he stayed out of trouble during last weekend, but he was not feeling comfortable with his Yaris as he mentioned understeer since the first stage of Friday afternoon. He put pressure on Sebastien Ogier in the final day of the rally as decreased their between gap from 16,7 to 8,2 seconds at the end of Stage 14, but Ogier responded by setting the fastest time in SS15. Rovanpera suffered from a front-left puncture in SS18 and was 11,1 seconds behind Ogier with one stage remaining for the finale, but eventually his efforts to take his second win of the season were not enough as Ogier managed to keep his first place and to finish ahead of his teammate for 6,7 seconds.
"The battle with Seb got quite tight at the end, and when you miss out on the win by a small margin like this then it’s not always the best feeling for a driver", Rovanpera said.
"But at the end we still scored good points for the championship.
"I stuck to my plan for the whole weekend, driving with quite good pace but not taking huge risks.
"So to still finish like this is quite nice.
"The final day was really tough for the cars: the penultimate stage especially with a lot of deep sand and ruts.
"It’s good that our cars were so strong and made it through, because to have the 1-2-3-4 finish for the team again here in Kenya is amazing".
Photo Credits: Toyota
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