WRC
Why Pajari is looking forward to Paraguay challenge
Sami Pajari is relishing the prospect of tackling a brand-new FIA World Rally Championship challenge at the inaugural WRC ueno Rally del Paraguay next week.
Paraguay’s distinctive red gravel roads will play host to round 10 of the season as the South American country becomes the latest nation to host a WRC event.
Next week crews will voyage into the unknown, competing on 19 brand new stages, comprising 333.18 competitive kilometres. While the lack of prior knowledge will provide a huge challenge, the prospect of a level playing field among the Rally1 crews is something that Toyota’s Pajari is particularly looking forward to.
“It is something really new for everyone. I like it always, even when familiar rallies have new stages, so to have a whole new event, I like that,” said Pajari.
"I’m not saying that it would be easy, but at least we will be on the same level as the others, so I think that it will be a cool rally.”
© WRC
Pajari heads to Paraguay after scoring a confidence boosting run to fifth in the last round in Finland. After a run of disappointing results in recent rounds, that included brake and fuel system issues in in Estonia and Greece respectively, the 23-year-old was back to his best on his native fast gravel roads in Finland.
For the first time this season Pajari was able to regularly match the pace of the front runners, delivering three stage wins in the process to take his career total to four. The triumphs arrived exactly a year after his maiden WRC stage win on his Toyota Rally1 debut at Rally Finland in 2024.
“Of course, the last two events [before Finland] have been really unfortunate with some issues, which were not only caused by myself, so of course it has been a bit tricky to always judge the speed and things," he added.
“It is always good to have a clean event like this and then it is much easier to focus on the performance.
“Still, I was not willing to take some really crazy risk but of course you really need to be on it to make the fastest times, but it was really cool to see that we can make it.”
While many of his peers opted for a holiday in the summer break, Pajari found himself back on the Finnish gravel stages last weekend, taking part in his hometown event - the Lahti Historic Rally - behind the wheel of a Toyota Altezza.
