Rallye Monte-Carlo stage guide: Day One

Rallye Monte-Carlo opens the 2011 Intercontinental Rally Challenge later today with the first of 13 special stages. Chris Patterson, who will co-drive Petter Solberg in a Peugeot France 207 Super 2000, is your guide to the stages.

SS1: Le Moulinon – Antraigues (36.87 kilometres – Live on Eurosport 2 and Eurosport Asia-Pacific from 10:00hrs-11:00hrs)

Chris Patterson: “A hugely demanding, classic Monte-Carlo stage, very twisty with hardly any straights at all and the pacenotes are very busy. To give you an example, I’ve got 65 pages of notes for this stage and hardly any straights at all, just a few patches of ice on the recce. There are a few climbs and descents but very twisty. On this stage and the next one the road has an old surface with bits of broken tarmac and rocks at the side of the road. And these huge concrete blocks to stop you falling over the side. The grip there on stage one and two is good providing there’s no ice.”

SS2: Burzet – St Martial (41.06 kilometres – Live on Eurosport 2 and Eurosport Asia-Pacific from 11:30hrs-12:45hrs)

“Again a very classic Monte-Carlo stage and slightly different to when it was last used in 2008. Again, very twisty, some big climbs to the top, then very fast downhill towards the finish. It’s incredibly technical, probably the most difficult stage of the rally and definitely without doubt the key stage of the rally. We’ve put into the descriptive notes how enormously hard this stage, and stage one, will be on tyres and brakes, with the brakes being the most important thing in the car. It’s just so twisty and technical that the brakes aren’t getting a chance to cool down so we’ll be driving with a bit of caution just to save the brakes.

“We’ve got to be very careful. It’s going to be a complicated rally. It’s very technical but with these guys in the IRC we’re here to win this rally and we’ll be going flat-out, but we’ll be trying to save the brakes and save the tyres on the first two stages. We do have a tyre service after the first stage but on Burzet we do have to use the same tyres for the second stage as well so it’s going to be quite complicated. But we’re here to win this rally and we’ll be going flat-out.”

SS3 and SS4 St Bonnet Le Froid – St Bonnet Le Froid (25.22 kilometres – Live on Eurosport and Eurosport Asia-Pacific from 14:00hrs-15:00hrs and 16:00hrs-17:15hrs)

“This stage has got it’s own weather system up there. It can be 10 degrees five kilometres away and then you get to St Bonnet and it’s minus four and the road is covered in ice. It’s a hugely fast stage and the start and finish are virtually beside each other – there’s only 500 metres between the start and the finish and there’s a big loop around. Whenever you head north it’s really fast and technical. But then you turn right at the top and you start coming down hill again back towards St Bonnet and the speeds are just absolutely incredible. There’s a new surface on the road so if there’s any ice at all it’s going to be a real challenge. But we enjoy it and we did a really good job on the recce knowing it’s a very fast stage. Our fastest note we use is called a ‘six’ and when we turn right at the top towards the finish it’s just ‘six, six, six, six, six’, it’s just so fast and incredible and we’re going to push hard on St Bonnet.”