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Hirvonen in Greece

June 4th 2008

Hirvonen fights for third place

Mikko Hirvonen drove the hardest race of his career in the Acropolis Rally in Greece. Third place after two broken suspension arms and one broken brake disc brought a smile to his face.

- I can’t help but be happy, although Sebastien Loeb snatched the WRC lead by one point. There could have been many more of those points between us.  This was the hardest race I’ve ever driven, said the Ford driver who dropped to second place in the WRC series.

The race was driven on the Greek gravel roads with the drivers suffering from over 30 degrees of heat. The gravel roads were severely rocky, and all the top names had their own problems. The race winner Loeb got through with only one puncture.

- As WRC leader, Loeb can enjoy driving the first car on the road in the next race - at least on the first day.
It will be fun to see how he handles first position on the Turkish roads, says Hirvonen.

- I lost too much time as the first driver in the Friday special stages in this race as well as in Rally of Sardinia. Otherwise, the driving went well and the car also worked fine. But I really didn’t need the two broken suspension arms.

Hirvonen entered the last stage of the Acropolis Rally in fourth place, a good one minute 50 seconds after Henning Solberg, who during that stage dropped from third to eighth place due to electrical problems, and Hirvonen snatched third place.

- When we noticed that Solberg had problems, we stepped on the gas and tried to attack in order to catch him up as much as possible. Then his problems continued, and we didn’t need to drive at full speed to the finish, Hirvonen explains.

The WRC series continues on 12-15 June on the rocky and slow gravel roads of Turkey. Before that Hirvonen’s agenda includes two days of asphalt stages in Britain.

- This one is a bit of a development stage. The next actual asphalt races, the German rally stages, are scheduled a bit later.