WRC
Torrential rain and a bee: How Fourmaux’s Finland victory fight unraveled
Adrien Fourmaux felt he had the pace to fight for victory at Secto Rally Finland before torrential rain arrived at the worst possible moment and changed the game.
The Hyundai Motorsport driver once again emerged with promise in his latest quest for a maiden WRC win, having taken an early lead after winning Thursday's super special. Fourmaux and co-driver Alex Coria remained firmly in the victory hunt, trailing leaders Sebastien Ogier and Julien Ingrassia by a mere 5.3sec at the end of Friday afternoon’s loop.
However, any hopes of victory were washed away when torrential rain hit Friday afternoon’s stages. Starting further down the road order, Fourmaux unfortunately was caught by the worst of the monsoon-like conditions. In SS7 the Frenchman was the slowest Rally1 car - dropping 1min29.8sec alone and plummeted from being 5.8sec from the lead to seventh overall.
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Fourmaux enjoyed a clean run through the remaining stages but the damage was done on Friday afternoon. The Hyundai driver recovered to fourth, 1min 35.9sec behind winners Sami Pajari and Marko Salminen, but was left to rue what could have been.
“It's not bad luck. It's just things happening. The rain came, and it was for us, and not the others, and that's all. You can call it bad luck, maybe it's true,” said Fourmaux. “But when you look at the time at the end of the rally, we finished 1min35s from Sami, and we lost 1min25s on him in this rainy stage.
“I would say we were in the fight. Before that, we were second and third, always changing positions for five seconds before the rain. We had the capability and maybe we were missing a little bit, but by pure pace, and if we were consistent, I really felt we could fight for the win. But the rain came and changed the game.”
To sum up Fourmaux’s run of bad luck, in the penultimate stage on Sunday a bee managed to find itself inside his i20 N Rally1 car. It proved to be a huge distraction while trying to navigate through ultra-fast stages that require full commitment with no margin for error.
“I did not see it [the bee] for the first like two kilometres, and then suddenly it appears. It was in front of me then it was on my door.
“But then suddenly it came on my helmet, near my eye. I had to brake. I tried to remove it and finally it moved away. Then I drove again. The risk is if he bites me there I go into the Power Stage, with only one eye, and the depth of vision is not the same. So [co-driver] Alex was trying to move it [with his pacenote book]. We braked and then it jumped out. It was crazy. I just had to slow down. It was too risky.”
Despite the misfortune, Fourmaux was glad to be among an exclusive club to complete the 20 stages while avoiding any major incident, as no less than six Rally1 crews suffered major crashes.
“There were only three cars that have not been damaged this weekend," he added. "It's Sami [Pajari], Oliver [Solberg], and myself. All the rest have damaged the car somewhere in the trees or a roll. Everybody had some moments, that is clear. The grip this year compared to last year was much more inconsistent. It was changing a lot more and the surface was a lot more compact.”
