Kris Meeke and Mads Østberg in the Top 5

Rally Poland got underway this afternoon in Mikolajki with a short leg featuring three stages. The first thirty or so kilometres of timed stages saw the Citroën Total Abu Dhabi World Rally Team crews establish themselves among the frontrunners. Kris Meeke and Paul Nagle ended the day third overall, whilst Mads Østberg and Jonas Andersson finished in fifth position, just 8.9 seconds behind the leaders.

With the shakedown, press conference and autograph-signing session, the day got off to a busy start for the Citroën Total Abu Dhabi Team’s crews. But at 3.30pm, it was time to head off and tackle the opening three stages of Rally Poland.

Kris Meeke wasted no time in getting to grips with the very quick Polish roads in his Citroën DS3 WRC. Never out of the top 5, he ended this short opening leg in the top three.
Just behind him, Mads Østberg stayed in touch on each stage, arriving back at the service park in fifth place.

In the WRC2, Sébastien Chardonnet and Thibault De la Haye were also among the leaders. In the new Citroën DS3 R5, they ended the day in sixth place in the category.

Winner of the first round of the FIA Junior WRC, Stéphane Lefebvre got off to the best start in Poland in the Citroën DS3 R3. After SS3, he leads from Martin Koci and Simone Tempestini.

QUOTE, UNQUOTE

Mads Østberg: “I’m not far off 100%, but you need to be at 101% on these stages! That’s what I’ll be aiming to do tomorrow, because I know I can do it. I think we can improve the set-up a bit more with the technical team.”

Kris Meeke: “We didn’t think that the stages would be quite so fast. As a result, we sometimes ended up being a gear higher than what we had marked in the pace notes. I’m pleased with how I have started the race. It was still very slippery, although there wasn’t any real sweeping this afternoon.”

Sébastien Chardonnet: My feelings were relatively good in the car and I felt confident. We need to rack up more road time to improve our consistency. The Citroën DS3 R5 is working really well. If we hadn’t run off a bit into a field on SS2, we would have been very close to the leaders.”