A few weekends ago, the Samsonas Motorsport team had a great, stress-free visit to Grafiteam Ralli, where there competing and had a small exhibition of gearboxes and dampers. Martynas Samsonas also tested the fast and full of crests roads of the Joutsa region in Finland with the BMW E36 M3 with N5 suspension and was even greeted by torrential rain during the one stage. Nevertheless, together with co-driver Ervinas Snitkas, they were able to win a few stages overall and take victory in the 2WD class and as 5th place in the overall standings. Martynas told a story about this trip to Finland.
Tell us how your weekend was in central Finland?
The format of the rally is very interesting, with “Gentlemen’s rules” 🙂 Five different special stages – a total of 60 kilometres and a service after 3 stages. But there is no time card, everyone politely follows their position and moves through the rally. If you need fix the car, you can join the queue an hour late and still finish the race. It’s different kind of rally, but I would say those also are needed.
No rush, no big stress 🙂
Talking about the result, you always want better, but I can say that we did everything 100%. The goal was to work with the dealer to show a good pace and a nice car.
This Grafiteam Ralli, which is not part of any championship, I would describe as belonging to our Rally Sprint series, but there were also several R5s and Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and Subaru Impreza cars. It was difficult for us to guess and predict where we would be. In winter, we only finished one stage, and we were 4th overall, but in winter it was much more slippery for single-axle cars, so again it’s difficult to compare what will happen in summer. We passed the first stage at, I would say, 90% of the speed and won with a minimal lead over Subaru. The rest of the rally was mixed – we lost one stage by a few seconds, won the next, and the next was with almost identical time. And things got even more interesting before the 4th stage. Since there was a delay in the second and third stages, they started letting the cars in 3 minutes in the fourth stage. We actually stood for 40 minutes + a bit more from the time we were ready. Well, the first ones starts, I see our competitors start and we are still waiting. I see the clouds rolling in, lightning, and I tell Ervinas that something is about to happen 🙂 It starts to rain, we start the stage and already at the first braking I have the feeling that the car is like on soap. The surface is like on the island of Saaremaa, apparently. When it’s dry, the grip is great, and when it’s wet, it’s like clay – a kind of soap. I realised that I couldn’t keep fighting for top positions, I had to at least get to the finish, because in some places I couldn’t see more than 50 metres. At the finish of that stage Ervinas said that we lost 45 seconds… Well, what can you do 🙂 So we still managed to win in the 2WD, and in the absolute classification we were seventh, and after the 5th stage we moved up to 5th place. I thought it was nice that they kind of checked everyone after the finish, a short wait in the queue for about 20-30 minutes, got awarded the class and that was it. We packed up and went home 🙂
The GrafiTeam Ralli Joutsa Rally is the first of three planned events in Finland, Northern Ireland, and San Marino. How did you manage to organize the plan and the logistics?
Well, it’s not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Because some people drive, others fly, others swim 🙂 Lots of tickets, lots of reservations, car hire and somewhere to stay. Our service bus will cover a distance of 9000 kilometres, but we are used to that. We returned from Finland on Sunday evening and on Monday morning the two boys left for the French port of Cherbourg. On Thursday we were all at the Euro M-Sport base with Ugnius. Some by car, some by plane.
After Ireland, Dalius and Arnoldas will stay a few more days, and on Thursday they have to come to Paolo Diana’s base. There they will continue to prepare the BMW, get ready, and we all, including Ervinas, will come to San Marino on the 30th of September. After the whole show, everyone will fly home, and Dalius and I will drive romantically through the Alps 🙂
You took part in the Toivakka Rally in the same region this winter – were the roads similar, and when is it more fun to drive them – in winter or autumn?
Perhaps there is no better or worse time. It’s incredibly cool in both winter and summer. Toivakka is about 50-60 kilometres from Joutsa. Both regions have legendary Finnish WRC stages. You can imagine how cool it is there. There were narrow sections and flat-outs over the jumps… In winter we didn’t write down one jump in pacenotes – just one crest, but it throw us in the air and I don’t know how much we flew. It’s a good thing we landed on the road 🙂 Now we have wrote down all “bad jump”, “jump”, “jump oppress” for Joutsa. We tried to be a little safer 🙂
The average speed rarely dropped below 130 km/h, and once it reached 142 km/h – such a speed stages was probably just right for the car?
Well, it seems that high speed stages are suitable for this BMW E36 with N5 suspension, although I notice that on slower and rough road sections we win even more against other 2WDs, and on fast sections you can fight against 4WD cars :))))))))) Anyway, I think this car is already a success. We’ve now driven about 900 sporty kilometres with it and we haven’t changed anything on the suspension, nor have we had to adjust the setup. We just drove it.
The Samsonas Motorsport logos could be seen in the communication of both the Toivakka and Grafiteam Ralli Joutsa competitions. What is the connection between Samsonas Motorsport and these competitions?
Our long-time representative in Finland, Jukka Hara and Dogbox Oy, are sponsors of these events. And of course, we are travelling with them and supporting our representatives with our participation and presence.