Petter Solberg returned to his winning ways as he took his third win of the year at round ten of the 2015 FIA World Rallycross Championship, the inaugural WorldRX of Spain.
Solberg’s last win came at Lydden Hill in May and since then, despite several retirements, he has managed to remain consistent enough to keep his lead in the Drivers’ Championship despite a strong run of form recently from both of the Team Peugeot-Hansen drivers of Timmy Hansen and Davy Jeanney. However the 2014 WorldRX Champion admitted this wasn’t an easy victory.
“We have fought hard for this win the whole weekend. We’ve run a lot of different set-ups on the car – we had to really work at it to catch Peugeot. All the time, the 208 was taking tenths of seconds, but eventually the brilliant PSRX engineers worked it out,” he explained.
Solberg had to work hard to make sure that he qualified for the Semi-Final stages and then to the Finals, but this was not an easy task.
“Everything was going quite well from the start, but in the third heat, I touched the wall on the left side – there was loads of dust in the car and I really couldn’t see so well. We struggled a lot to get it all back together for the fourth heat, but when we did, I needed to deliver a top result to defend a spot in the semi-finals. I had a bad start in the semi, so I was happy with second place in the end. We did some more set-up changes on car before final and the result came instantly,” Solberg explained.
However, it was a different matter when it came to the Final: “In the final, I had a proper start. I came side by side with Johan Kristoffersson into the first corner. Then I did my smart move with a break and a turn on the inside of Kristoffersson and Hansen. It was very slippery on the gravel; I did a mistake into the first gravel section but, fortunately for me, so did the others. After that, I drove really smart and pulled away in a controlled drive from the front.”
Despite holding onto a 35 point lead over Timmy Hansen, the SDRX driver holds this win in high esteem.
“To win again was so important to me and my whole team. At the last race, we were back on the podium again after a tough summer, but when I was in France I was looking at the top step thinking: “Hmm, it’s been too long since I stood there…This weekend, we put that right. And we did it at the right time, we did it at a race where we had a lot of sponsors with us – I hope they all enjoyed it as much as I did.”
