Rally Alpi Orientali

After one week in Italy we are back again. Unfortunately we had no internet connection in our hotel, so we couldn't inform you during the rally.
The recce was ok, but difficult. In Italy it isn't allowed to do recce during the "siesta" (12 a.m. - 2 p.m.). So we had a relaxing lunch. The stages were really tricky, narrow and no straight was longer then 100 meter. Also it was difficult to know which of the different tarmac sorts have grip. But all in all I was happy with my pace notes after the two days of recce.
On thursday we did the shakedown, which had a really rough tarmac. So the grip was amazing, but the stage was not really similar the the real stages. We decided to leave the shakedown after three runs. The setup was ok.
Friday, the first rally day, was completely dry. After a slower start we went a bit faster and finished without problems on place 16 overall and place 4 in the inofficial "Evo-League". On this kind of stages you have absolutely no chance with a normal group N- car against the lighter S2000 cars and there were 15 S2000 cars.
On saturday the weather was very unsettled. So we decided to use intermed tires which was safer. On the first three stages we managed to get closer to the italien guys, also we drove a stage besttime (of corse from all Evo's not overall). But on the last loop we took the wrong tires. Again intermeds, but it was dry. We lost nearly a minute, but we were happy to reach the finish.
Place 12 overall, place 4 in the "Evo-League" and winner of the Mitropa Rally Cup was a good end of a nice week in Italy.
Thanks a lot to Pirelli and Mario Isola for the help and information about the tires and also to our service-crew, who did a great job.

Greetings,
Hermann