2024 WRC Rally Finland | 7 talking points

Rovanperä’s wild finish

It’s not a massive secret that often these kinds of pieces are written during the rally. And, that can bite you from time-to-time. I had just finished writing about how Kalle Rovanperä walked to his first ever Rally Finland win when he hit a rock and disappeared into the undergrowth. 

Stunning was one way to describe it. The Finn had been totally dominant all weekend. Only team-mate Eflyn Evans had come close, and he was swatted aside on Saturday morning by a string of beautiful performances from Rovanperä. 

But then the rally was turned on its head by a rock. Just a short distance from the end of stage 19 – the penultimate test of the rally – the double World Champion found himself upside down in a tree and the world of rallying was open-mouthed.

Evans luck completely fails

You do wonder just how many ladders Elfyn Evans has walked under. He’s an eight-time WRC rally winner, and a three-time championship runner-up so is undeniably one of the top drivers on the off-road scene. But each time he seems to get close to moving one step further up the tree, all of his luck just seems to disappear. 

This time it was his Toyota GR Yaris Rally1’s front right driveshaft that decided to step in, or rather step out, breaking mid-stage and losing Evans several minutes. Then, trouble replacing it in the mid-day service ended with him leaving 16 minutes late and occurring even more penalties (he finished day two 19 minutes down on his team-mate).

Sunday points were his only chance to redeem something. So, he went all out and was ahead of Neuville when disaster struck again. Just 200m into the penultimate stage Evans was off. It was a weird incident, and just as he looked to be clawing back some points on Thierry it was all over. He’s now 36 points behind Neuville and worse, nine behind team-mate Sebastien Ogier.

Neuville’s still grumpy but everything went his way

Thierry Neuville is not a happy man in his Hyundai i20N. He’s still sweeping the roads at every single rally. He’s in a car that seems to quite clearly have been setup around team-mate Ott Tanak’s preferences and he keeps seeing people who are only doing a handful of rallies tearing off into the distance. 

But he walks away from Jyväskylä with a bigger championship lead than when he arrived. The Belgian couldn’t contain his shocked happiness at the end of stage 19 having just seen Elfyn Evans’ car stricken by the side of the road. And then to find himself an extra place up the standings with the demise of Rovanpera, sitting in a completely unexpected – and possibly slightly undeserved – second place. Well. The French-speaker from the German bit of Belgium must be struggling to believe his luck. 

He hadn’t been on a podium since May, and scored just nine points last time out, but Neuville moves on to Greece – where he won in 2022 – with a championship lead of 27 points.

Ogier the favourite?

But, surely Sebastien Ogier must be cracking those 40-year-old knuckles and thinking that a ninth WRC title is for the taking. He admitted to our friends over at DirtFish post rally that he had “no other option” than to continue for the rest of the season.

Speculation that began in Latvia as a trickle became a waterfall through the build-up to Finland and was practically an ocean by the time Ogier crossed the line to take a fortuitous win. He now sits just 27 points off Neuville in second place and is in the kind of form that we’ve not seen since his dominant Volkswagen days. 

It would seem utterly baffling if he didn’t decide to do the last four rounds of the season now. He has the chance to add a ninth title as a coda to an incredible career, finally matching countryman Sebastien Loeb and perhaps banishing any detractors to the idea that he’s the greatest rally driver of all time. 

Tänak’s terrible start

On the list of people having what could only be called a Very Bad Weekend is Ott Tänak, the man who was the form driver coming into Finland. The Estonian made it less than 40km into Rally Finland before rolling his Hyundai off the road and into a tree.

Tänak himself was left unscathed by the incident, but co-driver Martin Järveoja was taken to hospital and kept in overnight for observation. Tänak has kept his championship alive by returning from crashes to take a decent Sunday points haul, but the scale of his crash in Finland left that out of the question. 

He’ll be back fighting in Greece, but the run of super fast gravel rallies upon which Ott excels is now over. Will he be able to fight back or might the 2019 WRC champion find himself playing a support role to Neuville?

Pajari’s impressive debut

Second rally in a row that a local driver has made an impressive debut in a Rally1 Hybrid. After Martins Sesks’ amazing and heartbreaking run in Latvia, it was the turn of Sami Pajari to get his chance to step up at his home rally in Finland.

The 22-year-old, who has won two WRC-2 rounds this year, is a big future hope for Toyota and got his chance in a specially-liveried GR Yaris in Finland. OK, so he did mess up a little on the first day – reducing the size of his Toyota significantly during an incident. But on day two he matched Sesks’ achievements by clinching his first-ever stage win in his first ever Rally1 experience. We look forward to his next top-level outing. You have to wonder how Takamoto Katsuta was feeling 51 minutes behind.

Solberg in command

There are very few people around who wouldn’t be extremely happy to see Oliver Solberg take the WRC-2 crown in 2024. 

The son of 2003 WRC champion Petter, the way that Oliver was cast aside by Hyundai following his second season in a top level WRC car didn’t go down well with many. Since then, he’s fought his way back through a self-run WRC2 drive and now a top level one with crack outfit Toksport. 

No other Rally2 cars could touch Solberg in Finland. The Swede was able to take victory by 39 seconds over a returning Jari-Matti Latvala and over a minute ahead of rival Lauri Joona. He now sits 28 points ahead of Pajari in WRC-2 with just a handful of nominated rallies remaining. 

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images