Frustration and disappointment for Campana

Rally star Pierre Campana endured a weekend to forget at Rallye Sanremo after a series of technical issues hampered his progress from the very opening loop of the event. The Corsican ace battled valiantly in spite of the many challenges that presented themselves over the two-day rally to claim eighth place after the 13 special stages.

The dramas began on the third stage of the opening loop on Friday following two competitive opening stages, as his car developed an engine sensor fault which forced his engine engineers to make changes at the first service. Unfortunately, further problems related to the engine resulted in a difficult second loop, which was made worse with a broken gear lever during the fifth stage.

Pierre had aimed to use the final Friday stage, the 44km Ronde, to make up valuable time. He was performing extremely well, on the pace of the front-runners at the 30km split, but an inexplicable puncture slowed him significantly towards the end of the stage and prevented him from making up the lost time.

Saturday saw much of the same frustration with the car suffering engine misfires throughout the morning, which necessitated substantial work from the team during the lunchtime service. The team did a fantastic job in a bid to cure the problems but there were still issues that stopped Pierre from working his usual Sanremo magic. It has been a tough two days for Pierre, his co-driver Sabrina de Castelli and the Munaretto team, but Pierre hopes to turn this disappointment and frustration into positives at next weekend’s World Rally Championship event in France.

Pierre Campana said: “What a tough Sanremo rally for us all! It seems that no matter what we did, there was no improvement, so actually to finish the event in eighth is a big achievement in itself. I must thank the Munaretto guys who worked so hard and remained committed to resolving our issues right to the end. Things started to go wrong from the third stage when we had an engine sensor fault but then got worse during the day with the snapped gear lever in SS5 and most frustratingly the puncture in SS7. We were running strongly and right on the sort of pace I expected to be at when out of nowhere we picked up a puncture. There seemed to be no reason for it, but it is typical of the weekend we have had. Today was tough from start to finish and I can only thank everyone involved for persevering. Thanks also to my sponsors Perin for their backing this weekend, as well as Sparco, VP Racing and the entire Munaretto team. I hope we’ll have the opportunity to come back fighting at an IRC event in the not too distant future. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Peugeot on a tremendous victory today.”