Road order to affect Azores result, say crews

Leading drivers on Sata Rallye Açores expect road position to have a huge influence on the outcome of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge qualifier, which gets underway this evening with three stages.

Crews will run in competition number order tonight before starting Friday’s second leg in rally order, albeit with the top five places reversed. The same system will be adopted on Saturday after event organisers altered plans to run in rally order on the final day of the gravel event.

Starting order is particularly critical on gravel events because of the effect created by the leading cars cleaning the stage surface of a loose layer of gravel for the cars running further down the order.

“Today is an important day because if you are fifth tonight then you will be first on the road tomorrow and I don’t want to be first on the road,” said Peugeot Sport Portugal driver Bruno Magalhães. “We will see what happens but it’s difficult to open the road. I did this on Sardinia and it was incredible.”

Last year’s winner Kris Meeke will be the first driver to tackle Thursday’s stages. He said: “It can be a big disadvantage. It’s a different rule for every rally but last year they did it in championship order. Now it’s done in number order and I’m actually fifth in the championship so still have to go first. It could really affect us.”

Drivers will start in two-minute intervals. The opening stage, the 14.90-kilometre Lagoa Marques run, gets underway at 16:40hrs local time.

Top 10 IRC starting positions

1 Kris Meeke
2 Juho Hänninen
3 Jan Kopecký
4 Bruno Magalhães
5 Ricardo Moura
6 Andreas Mikkelsen
7 Bernardo Sousa
8 Vitor Pascoal
9 Sérgio Silva
10 Pedro Peres