Is Ken Block in WRC this year? If so, what team?

Ford
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/80754

thanks a lot

I could not help myself, I started laughing like silly to the above.
Amri, please have a look at some of the clips posted in this thread to understand a bit what rally is about. I assume you are looking at timesheets only?
Kimi has done amazingly well and it is very likely that he will improve as a rally driver. Usually it is like that, you first rally is not the best in your career. Ok, he have done a couple of other rallies, but never in a "real" car (the Fiat was ok, but not more). Sordo left out maybe half a second per km himself, being a newbie on snow, so for sure the difference might not have been the same in a real WRC rally, but on the other hand I am sure Kimi held back a bit as well, specially after the crash on stage 2. All in all, a very promising rally by Kimi, a solid one by Sordo. I do not think we will see any stage wins from Kimi until very late this season, but I do think they will start coming.

Anyone else find the hyperbole and 'rad' English being used by the president of a company to be totally nauseating and pathetic, or is it just me?

You did notice the word 'normally' in my sentence? Rally GB was not a good one for Rossi for some reason... but then conditions were bloody tricky at times...



A car normally gets a little 'loose' .....when you have driven it into a tree!

The new Mini Countryman... and likely base platform for the new Prodrive run Mini WRC car due for 2011, of which an official announcement is expected soon..

Damn this thing is ugly! However I suspect that once it gets the Prodrive treatment...it will look quite mean!

http://www.dieselstation.com/wallpapers/al...man-2011-12.jpg

But I need to point out that they said it also BEFORE the lumberjack show.

Trickier than 15cm of snow and ice on the road?

In trickyness, nothing beats mud.

Actually, snow (when it is really snow, like in the Lapland rally) is quite predictable.

Ice?

I take it you''ve never driven a car in the snow? Mud is easy. There's nothing predictable about snow. Absolutely nothing at all. Well, actually you can predict that it will either have no grip or no-****ing-grip-at-all. And it changes every 10m or so depending on where there's ice, black ice, lots of snow, very little snow(actually worse sometimes), loose snow on the road, thick heavy snow on the road, mushed up snow, tightly packed icy snow(the worst), dips underneath, slippery icy tyre tracks with loads of snow around them etc. It's fun to drive on though.

I have many years experience of snow rallies. It's quite easy. I prefer it to any other surface.

EDIT: That is IF (as I mentione before) it is really proper, "northern", snow and temperatures below -5 C. The situations you describe is more common when you are more south than the Lapland rally is, and typical in the mountains where temperatures are varying very much depending on how high (up) you are.

If my memory serves rightly in his other outings Rossi has lost even more than 2 sec per km to the top drivers.

So you haven't experienced the track changing with every corner and after every single car has driven on it? It's always different, there's no predicting it. If you have pacenotes they are only a rough guide as you cannot predict what the corner will be like in 1 hour, let alone the next day. Quite easy, are you kidding? Tarmac is easy. There's very little variation and you don't get any surprises. You can seek the limit and take that feel for the road to the next corner. Try that with exposed icy gravel in one corner and frozen slosh in the next.

A little about Tänak. He went to Finland as a mechanic for Georg Gross. He didn't even know he was going to drive. The car was 2003 Focus so it was like 6 years older than the C4-s and it was also his very first race with a WRC car. Tänak häd no experience whatsoever before with a WRC car.

Of course it varies, but if it is cold it varies in a predictable way

If it is warmer than -5, or rather -8 actually, it starts to become painful. At zero it is hard and at + anything can happen. At that point the road does not want to be touched, it tries to push away anyone that dares to touch it. Still you can not resist her curves.

I think he might be good addition to WRC season.

I think WRC will have a great year this time, and it's obvious that they made a shake-up and seeking for media attention with stars like Loeb, Raikkonen and Block.
It will be good for sure !

And what some posters seemingly don't know that these guys are simply demi-gods on four wheel...

Sorry but Hairpin is spot on.... On snow/slush/ice if it is cold and hard, it is difficult to drive on, but simply requires a certain style and committment as the studs give you an incredible amount of grip, which is why in fact, Rally Sweden, is one of the fastest rounds of the championship. The only time is becomes a nightmare is when there is so much gravel, that you start to rip out studs and THEN...you have grip problems. Remember this is not like driving a road car, these cars are all running varying length studs dependent on conditions.

Wet mud in contrast... is the complete opposite. Gravel tyres even with a snow/mud pattern can quickly have the treads filled to provide about half as much grip as the clean tyre and the surface is completely unpredictable. Ask any of the top WRC guys which is the more difficult surface a nice snowy stage in Sweden or a wet Welsh forest stage on Rally GB.. the latter wins every time, mainly because they can also have ice at times on Rally GB, except on that event, they wont have studs and there will not be enough ice to warrant running a studded tyre.

So yes..a wet mud stage is considerably more difficult to drive than Snow and Ice if you are running the correct tyres. Remember we are talking competition here..not road and thus tyres are the deciding factor.

I have to agree with Hairpin and FlatOverCrest, too.

"Packed" snow isn´t particularly difficult surface. Very much the same applies to "packed" gravel, actually (loose or wet gravel is different matter). In both cases, with correct tyres, you´ll have surprisingly good grip and most importantly, relatively forgiving handling on the limit. On ice there is less grip and bit less forgiving handling on the limit, but it´s amazing how effective studs on racing tyres are. Nothing like the ones used in road cars.

On winter, when temp gets close to zero, you tend to get more difficult conditions. Slush is tricky...once threads get filled with it, it´s like aquaplaning, meaning you´ll lose all grip. Not easy.

Needless to say, there are exceptions; uneven surface of snow on the road, ice covered with snow, snowstorms (although we rarely talk about snowstorms here in Finland!), etc.

THAT is tricky! LOL. Wind packed snow sculpured by the wind over the banks! If you are one the first you have to pray, or curse, in every corner because cold wind "drifted" snow looks so cute. It looks so soft and nice that you want to take a book and lay down there and read. But it throws your car it into the forest in no time if it manage to grab your front inner wheel. Ok, with 4WD you are usually ok if you are committed, but with a RWD it is not much you can do.

Yep. Being used of RWD, I still remember having some difficulties grasping the concept of pointing the nose where you want to be and keeping the throttle floored. Kinda went against my instincts at the time, I guess. Not so different from the problem newbies often have with jumps; your brain says "I´m flying, better lift when I land on ground again" - which is exactly what you aren´t supposed to do!

Welcome to the forum and to this thread - our Estonian friend?

OK let's talk about driving on snow.

Something like over a 10 years ago I had a rear-wheel driven car with a reasonably powerful engine (110+ horsepower). No ABS no Traction Control, nothing, it was from the 1970's.

During Easter time I decided to drive up North in Finland to see my relatives. When I left home the weather was clear no problem. But it soon became a lot worse! It started to snow quite heavily and the tarmac road I was driving on quickly became a nightmare for me. I had pretty new studded Winter tyres. I was travelling at about 70-80 km/h which was a bit slower than usual and I thought I had slowed down enough to make up for the poor weather.

The road had those small "rails", you know, where the tyres touch the road they have pressed the tarmac down so that the road is not like new any more. I was aware of that and was taking it more carefully because of that - I had noticed the road is slippery and noticed the car wants to come out of the "rails" and I tried to drive either on the rails or outside of them but it's pretty difficult as the road was not that wide so I was practically forced to drive "on the rails". I knew that's not good but still I thought I can handle it if I am very careful, "driving on my fingertips".

Then at one straight I lost control of the car. The rear-end just snapped all of a sudden and the front of the car steered to the lane on the left - against incoming traffic! I could see the look on the face of the woman who drove the car that was coming right at me - the distance was not very much.

Thankfully I had prepared for these kinds of situations by doing some "rally driving" and practising how to control a car which is out of control So with that training I knew to floor the clutch pedal immediately and correct the steering to get the car back to the correct lane. It's in fact pretty incredible how quickly I reacted - but had I not reacted that quickly I would have crashed into the other car there is no doubt about that because it was so close.

Then, like 2 seconds later after I had gotten the car back on my lane, I looked from the rear-view mirror at the skid marks my car had left on the road. It was a clear curve going completely to the other lane and then back to my lane. On that wrong lane many cars were driving to the other direction so had I crashed to the first one then others could have crashed into us making it multiple times worse. My hands started shaking and I started sweating. I wanted to stop the car as soon as possible because I had never been that close to death and was shaking so that I had even more trouble driving the car and was horrified it would snap away again as unexpectedly and violently as it did on the first time.

OK so next gas station I stop and have a cup of coffee. All the time at the table I am shaking and pondering whether I should stay there for the night. Crazy as I am I decided to continue, there was no way I was going to spend a night at a gas station when a comfortable bed was waiting for me.

So I continued. Just a few kilometres down the road there were several car accidents - they had driven off the road and were stuck in the snow bank in the ditch. At that point I started to realise really how lucky I was. There were really many cars, better cars, which had gone off road. Fortunately I did not see a car against car crash. OK so this was the main road up North. And now I was really struggling with the car. Having learned from my near-death experience a good half an hour ago, I knew to keep the speed well below my normal speed. So I decided I will keep it at 50-60 km/h. Even that was too fast. I remind you this is a main road in Finland and not a small road by our standards. I had trouble getting up even the smallest hills that there were. So that the speed would drop to something like 30 km/h. This with studded Winter tyres! I almost couldn't believe it - I thought I had good tyres but that weather was just simply too much for them.

OK so I struggled like that for several tens of kilometres pretty much all the way to the junction which would take me out of the main road and into a smaller road - which was a tarmac road too however. But what was different was that that road was covered with a "packed" layer of snow. It was not like the main road which had been clear of snow and ice before the storm. And this road was much, MUCH better! Really this snow had a hard layer of snow and then a little bit of fresh snow on top of that hard layer. Not too much fresh snow - just enough to make a nice cloud of snow up in the air when driving through it.

I quickly regained my confidence in the car and in the tyres and in myself. The level of grip was hugely different and I am not kidding - it was like night and day. I sped up to 100 km/h at first and took the curves with ease - no trouble at all. This is probably the best Winter driving experience I have ever had - ironically I also had the worst Winter driving experience just an hour ago. So I was going at about 100 km/h on a road totally covered with snow and this was a pretty normal road car, no special equipment. I can see if the average Brit would have been sitting next to me he or she would have thought I am crazy and would have been screaming at me to slow down. But I knew me and my car were back to where we belong and it was good, very good, so no screaming Brits could have stopped me driving at the speed I was driving at.

I enjoyed the driving so much that I had a smile on my face, imagine the relief once I had gotten out of the main road which was extremely slippery (I haven't experienced anything that bad since then and that was over 10 years ago). I decided to go even faster! Of course! What else could I do in that situation? Just an hour ago I had almost shat my pants for almost crashing to an incoming car and was only saved by the quick reaction and by the knowledge of what a driver of that kind of a car needs to do in that situation. So I accelerated to 120 km/h and it was fantastic! No trouble at all with the grip!







And now you think "Then he crashed what a moron, ha-ha!"




Not quite! As I said it was fantastic. I felt I could go even faster, and I think I did. I don't think I exceeded 135 km/h but it was pretty darn fast considering just about an hour ago I had almost crashed and died because of poor grip and too much speed. This road was pretty curvy so it was not like there were long straights to speed up on. There were curves and I had to brake every once in a while as there were some too tight corners to be taken at that speed - but what was remarkable was that there was no trouble going through the turns even at a high speed. The speed was well over the speed limit even in the Summer. And I really felt I could go even faster. What a huge contrast to what I had experienced earlier that evening. I remind you the road was completely covered with snow, a hard layer of snow so there was no tarmac in sight at all and the tyres and the studs were only touching a hard layer of snow to find grip from. To this day this remains the best Winter driving experience I have had, as I said ironically only about an hour ago of almost getting myself dead because 60-80 km/h was too fast on a "supposedly" better main road which was better taken care of by the powers that be. That main road was hugely worse than this smaller road going to the farm I would sleep at - this smaller road was better because it had a nice and hard layer of snow and it wasn't tarmac that just had gotten wet and frozen like the main road was.

That is how it is. Nice story.

How did Kimi end the rally up? Did he really reach the 56th position? Is it because of the accident? How did he acchive in the separate phases of the race?

Actually I ask it beacuse I saw him at the top of the list at the different sections of the race...

He had a crash at stage two, lost something around 30 minutes. After that he was on average .8 second per kilometer slover than Dani Sordo, who won all stages. Had stage two gone as the others, he would have finished second. Good result. Well, not result on the board, but you know what I mean

Thanks for the answer. I simply wanted to get to know it. Actually I didn't understand how can it be that he always was at the top (2nd, 3rd position) though he ended up in the middlefield.

Overall Kimi did ok,nothing special, just ok.
And what comes to his crash at stage 2, we will see lots of those from him this year.

LOL, good points and true. We just had a snowstorm here and I was out driving in it and it was very hard to predict, and indeed seemed to vary between almost no grop and no freaking grip at all.

so, apart from the 30 minutes of the crash how much time did he lose?

It takes practise, guys.

Once you have years of experience, it becomes routine. Eg here in Finland we have slippery conditions every year, and people generally drive as fast as during summer.

Obviously rallying - or any discipline where you try to go on the limit - is another matter. In regular traffic snow & ice feels tricky because there is less grip (in comparison to summer conditions, where you have far more grip than you´ll ever need)...but once you go racing or rallying, regardless of grip level, you go as fast as you can. Then it is less about absolute level of grip, and more about how the car handles on the limit. I can tell you folks packed snow isn´t as tough as slush, mud, etc. It´s fairly predictable.

Interesting story Anssi. Thanks
You guys should all be driving 4x4s in Finland.

That is correct, I am an Estonian

I´ve never had 4X4. If you have the basic winter driving skills down (namely throttle control), 4X4 won´t make much difference in regular traffic. The only significant upside is you don´t get stuck as easily as with FWD or RWD, but with proper winter tyres and little bit of good thinking, that rarely happens, anyway. I find it strange some of the soccer mums buy those huge 4X4´s. They do get going well, thanks to AWD, but it does squat to help them turn or stop. In fact, they´d be better off with "regular" Volvo etc. The last thing you want on slippery country road is crappy driver and 3-ton SUV

Add the total kilometers of the rally and multiply it by 0.8

In 2009 kimi would have scored 24 points.

How do I know?

made this simple and unscientific calculation: 0.8 sec per km in 350 km [ the length of a normal rally] it's about 4m:40 sec.

So, I took Dani Sordo's results and added about 5 minutes and to improve realism took kimi out of two events.

If Kimi can Keep himself within that margin I expect he could score some nice points altough I do not belive that he will only retire twice.

C'ant wait for next rally

It depends how you measure it. If your measure is normal rally driver who is starting at wrc-level then Kimi's performance is ok. But if your measure is for someone who has driven 600 competitive kilometres with rally car then Kimi's performance is astonishing.

Why you aiming that at us Brits?

160 kph sounds perfectly acceptable to me!

Nice story. My best winter driving experience happened on the slippery main road. The speed limit during winter time is 80kp/h. The traffic was doing something like 70kph. I was doing most of the time over 100kph so I had to slow down before overtaking slower drivers or taking corners. I had winter tyres but no studs. On full throttle the tyres were spinning even on 5th gear, although I only had 45kW. But I had enough grip to keep car safely on the road. You don't need much grip, I felt perfectly in control of the car. If there are no strong lateral forces influencing the car you don't really need grip. If your car is understeering, the car in fact becomes less nervous on the rails when it gets slippery. It just goes along the rails without steering. The car had no safety equipment of any kind compared to today's cars. I'm pretty sure the average brit would have shit his pants on that ride. I didn't feel in danger and I have never had the slightest crash with my cars.

I'm trying to say that it's possible to drive fast and safely on ice. But if you expect summer grip (or you are driving an old RWD) that's what will get you in trouble.

Seriously... Cant you have a go at the French a few times as well.. Although to be fair I did make my co-driver 'squeal' a bit in Geilo and yes he was a Brit...

It's just a joke about the Brits in my story there... I was trying to refer to people in general who do not experience Winter like we do here up in the North. So yeah the French would do just as well

I like them both. I've been to the UK and I really liked the place. The only thing wrong with the trip was when I had to leave.

I did hear from my relative there who has lived there for tens of years of how the traffic there is easily in chaos when they get a little bit of snowing. That's what happens when they are not used to it and are not prepared. The cars are not prepared for that weather so it's very different compared to our situation because we are allowed to use good Winter tyres (with studs) by law and that's a major difference - I would not drive a car with Summer tyres for example today. It's just way too dangerous. So when you in the UK get one or two days in a year when it can be like that it's not a surprise the traffic is in chaos. We don't expect you to have the Winter tyres ready so it's very understandable your traffic can get very chaotic when you get a snowstorm all of a sudden.

Yeah - so I think you can see why someone from that kind of country could be screaming in my car in the Winter that I have to slow down. Because, you know, this is what I was thinking when I wrote that into my story, that the person screaming doesn't know the tyres I have are very different to the tyres he or she uses in Britain. That's the point - perhaps many tourists miss that little fact when they come here and wonder how can we drive so fast in the Winter. The studded tyres make a huge difference. I would not drive my car for example today if it had Summer tyres on it - that would be insane. Of course the tyres don't turn Winter into Summer as my story above makes very clear but there is such a dramatic difference that if you are not aware of it then you might very well get upset about the speed we are travelling at in the snowy and icy roads. That was the point I had in mind there in my story.

I had to drive a military off-road truck in the Winter which had the same tyres Summer and Winter but that's a special case any ways. It was pretty tricky to manage it if the roads were covered in ice. I had to be really really careful with the brakes, for example. It had pneumatic brakes and they don't have such a good feel as the hydraulic brakes have so you need to start pressing the brake pedal very gently first to let the brake system wake up and provide some feedback to you so you know how much to press it. That almost caught another driver of those trucks out when we were driving to a camp - he was driving ahead of me at 60-70 km/h and touched the brake a bit too much and the truck got a little sideways there for a moment. I had fun watching it but I am not sure if the 20 or so people were laughing who were sitting in the back of that truck. I had almost 30 people in my truck too and it's pretty needless to say I was really extra careful because of that. That kind of situations teaches you how to be extra gentle with the car and prepare for what is ahead so you are not in a hurry so much as you would usually be. Next time you watch a bus driver drive I am pretty sure you will notice he or she is being much smoother driving the car than the average person driving their own cars is. To drive like that can even be physically exhausting because you have to focus hard on the job. I can see I would be pretty stressed-up if I were a bus driver. Yeah so say them a few nice words next time you see them, their job is not as easy as it first could appear to be

For those interested in Ken Block's build up for his year...

Here is his new Rally mount for the US Rally Championship! The car is a Swedish Olsbergs MSE team Ford Fiesta similar to the M-Sport S2000, EXCEPT... Ken has a Turbo bolted to his Fiesta 2 Litre engine...and it certainly goes very well indeed!!!





This is a video of Ken testing prior to the Sno-Drift... I am sure he wishes he could use this car on the WRC... the thing looks and sounds superb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K37p0vw9cU

More details on his site.. http://www.monsterworldrallyteam.com/

I know sir...I was just messing with you!

These are what I used when in Norway in 08...


Proper Grip!

I absolutely heart that car!

A bit of an unreal feeling aint it? Specially if you are used to family car winter tires. Feels more satisfying than gravel, a kind of stubborn unseen force that pulls you forward relentlessly. Beautiful.

Absolutely...takes some getting used to! It's the aggressiveness with the brakes and throttle that took a couple of days to get used to, but yes once you feel the traction these things give you...confidence takes over and its up through the box!

AWESOME!