How was the weekend with Santa and the elves for you and your team?
Hello Rally 🙂 The preparation itself was very stressful a few weeks before we left for Santa, but the whole week of the rally went quite well and without stress. I left on Saturday with a van and a trailer. My co-driver Ugnius arrived on Sunday, and Tadas and Markas arrived on Tuesday evening.
4 Arctic Lapland Rallyes with 4 different cars. Do you feel that you are beginning to understand the nuances of this very special rally?
I do not think I understand much. I have said it many times… Being fast in Lithuania and being fast in Finland are two different things, at least for me. Of course, you can drive fast here, but speed comes at a price. Such random drives are difficult in terms of speed.
Another thing is the starting position. The further it is, the less chance you have of going fast. In the shakedown alone, the time was3 seconds worse after an hour and a half break. Driving is difficult and even stupid, I would say. This car lacks of power, the ruts are deep, gravel is frozen. In most stages, most of the time we have to drive in the rutted lane. If you try to go faster – you get out of the lane and end up in the snow… We had maybe 5% of the real winter surface. Another thing is that if you drive fast and give everything you have, the tires are dead after one stage. Not just the rear tires, but all four. That was the case on Saturday. We drove the morning stage as hard as possible with this car, so at another stage, we had slick tires. It also started to snow, so that was it. On the other hand, after the sixth stage, we were leading between the BMWs and all the RWD cars, but as I said – later on we let it go because degradation was too high. We shredded 20 tires – we had 6 good used ones and had to buy 14 new ones. It’s incrediblle 🙂 I am afraid to tell the accountant when I get back 🙂
It was the first start with the Ugnius Vainevičius. How did he manage his job?
Everything is very, very good. Ugnius is trying very hard. Maybe even too much 😉 He was so focused so that he did not even understand jokes 🙂 He tries hard and everything works out for him. Reading the pacenotes was without the questions at all. On that note, if while driving there were no questions asked, it means that everything is great. Let us just say that the pacenotes reading itself is maybe 5% of the total work the co-driver has to do. But everything else – the whole preparation, the whole process, everything is well planned and executed. Only when we got home from the finish in the evening, Ugnius was able to relax and start smiling 🙂
This time the Arctic Lapland Rally was a bit shorter, with fewer individual kilometers and a changed reece system? How it was?
It was noticeable and unfortunately not in a good way. Of course, there are reasons for everything. Probably they could not use the good old stages because of Nato affairs, but why they set up these weird reece schedules, I do not know. There were terrible traffic jams. Whereas before you could reece the Arctic when you wanted, as much as you wanted, and you might not meet another car all day, this time it was a total problem. In reality, you drive in traffic on all stages of the route. That does not add to the quality of the pacenotes. In other years we drove about 250 unique kilometers, all the stages were different and long – 50 or 60 kilometers each. This year, the longest was 33 km long and we did it even twice.
Normally we see you in fast, powerful cars, but this time you drove a relatively simple BMW 328i E46. Is driving such a car still fun enough?
It went really well. Now I look at it and think it was a really good decision to drive this car. Of course, we have fitted our sequential box, but everything else – stock BMW Cup car. It does not use fuel, nothing heats up, nothing happens 🙂 Since the main goal was to practice working with Ugnius, so this simple car was just right. The are no questions like if there is turbo boost or not, if dampers work or not – simple 🙂
Tell us more about why it might be better to reece with a sports car instead of a SUV
Well, it’s not good to reece with a big SUV because you sit much higher and see the road very differently than when you’re driving and sitting low. If you write down pacenotes and listen to the co-driver, it’s hard to drive afterward 🙂 We did reece with our van in one Arctic Lapland Rally and when we had to drive the Ford Fiesta N5 it was a nightmare at the time. If you see the road and you don’t understand it from pacenotes, then your confidence disappears, and can’t expect a good result.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do reece with a sports car. It was simply a coincidence that we were doing the reece and racing with the same car 🙂 The sports suspension felt very good, because here in the Arctic the stages are very bumpy. I don’t know how to describe these bumps – we write it as BUMPS because they throw the car, the car jumps. If you don’t have such “bumps” in your pacenotes and you drive an L7 at 150 km/h, it can just spit you out. We once suggested to Linas Vaškys to buy a BMW E46 and install sports dampers for reece. He did it and also reeced with such a car and once again thanked us for the good advice 🙂
Tell us more about your plans for the start in Portugal
As Mr. Taison says – everyone has a plan before you get kicked in the teeth 🙂 Anyway – the car is already on the road to Portugal. Our plan is 4 rallies in there. We want to help our customers RMC Motorsport and Domingos Sport to develop the N5 class in Portugal, even if things are going well there without us. I don’t know how many cars are already in Portugal at the moment, but in the fall there were already 5, and after that, I saw that they brought even more. That shows that the N5 isn’t a bad project. A good and practical thing if you have clients and rent out cars. If the car is assembled with really high quality, it practically doesn’t wear out. Linas Vaškys said that he has only changed a few hinges in two years.
We’ll see how it goes there. I don’t like to talk nonsense. Like I said – different countries, different levels. The main championship in Portugal is very strong. It’s not for nothing that Kris Meeke chose Portugal to drive. I think it’ll be very difficult in terms of results, but my goal and the goal of all of us (team, RMC and Domingo) is to show an optimal, good pace and reliability. If we achieve these things, we will be happy 🙂