Q&A:
Elfyn
Evans

Two WRC Academy wins in a row and your first victory in Finland. How are feeling? “I’m feeling pretty good. I was here last year and didn’t get on quite so well. We did a local rally, a round of the Finnish championship, around two weeks ago and that really did put us in the right frame of mind and we knew what we had to do. We came here and to lead from the off was really good. But it was quite difficult to maintain a safe pace and still stack up the stage times yesterday. We went more safely today to make sure we finished. It was quite a long rally, it was short in the sense of distance but quite intense in the sense it was packed in very, very tightly. It was a difficult rally but I’m very pleased with the result.”

When Alastair Fisher, who was your big rival, had his problems did that make it harder or easier for you? “Alastair would have kept us honest if he’d kept on going over the weekend because he was going very well and it would have been great to have battled all the way through. Certainly it wasn’t easy to manage our lead because we had a big lead and we wanted to build on that further because it’s so easy to pick up a puncture. Some of the stages were rough and very cut up in places. We were never really 100 per cent comfortable, we always had to work on it and keep one eye on the times. It was definitely a challenge but we’re happy with the outcome.”

People don’t really associate Finland with rough stages, how bad was it? “On the second pass, because the nature of the stages is quite soft, it cut up. For a World Rally Car it’s not so bad but certainly the stages on Saturday morning were very tough on the cars and we had to veer on the side of caution just to make sure we got it through to the end.”

What’s it like to be leading the championship at the halfway point of the season? “It didn’t start off so great in Portugal where we had a very disappointing rally. We had our heads quite low to be honest coming from Portugal. But we went home and worked on things, joined up with Phil [Pugh] and worked really hard together to make sure this would work and so far, so good. We have Tarmac rallies now, which is a different challenge altogether. Germany is next and we’ve never been there before, I was in France last year but Spain is a new rally for us as well. We need to work hard but hopefully we can continue our success.”

Obviously it’s been an emotional time for you recently following the loss of your former co-driver and friend Gareth Roberts. Were you thinking about him today? “Of course, for myself and obviously Craig [Breen] as well he’s always on our minds. He was a great guy and will never be forgotten. I’m sure he was looking over us today.”