M-Sport World Rally Team’s Mads Østberg continued his consistent performance on the Rallye Deutschland asphalt as he finished Day 2 in sixth place.
The Norwegian who doesn’t prefer driving on asphalt has used his vast experience of driving on the German roads with co-driver Ola Fløene to good use in the Ford Fiesta RS WRC. His Day 2 result has put him within two places of his best-ever WRC result at this rally in 2012 in fourth.
The sister M-Sport Fiesta RS WRC of Eric Camilli/Benjamin Veillas recovered from their Friday opening stage off to rebuild their confidence on the tricky roads of Rallye Deutschland to finish Saturday in sixtieth place.
Meanwhile, DMACK’s Ott Tänak/Raigo Mõlder suffered an alternator failure on SS11 as the Estonians were in fifth place at the time. Tänak will resume on Sunday under Rally2 regulations.
Østberg said “We didn’t have much to lose today so we tried a few different setups. Some of it was okay, but not everything and we need to work a little bit more on that. We’ll try something new again tomorrow to see if we can be a bit more confident out on the stages. We found something that seemed to work quite well on the rear, but tomorrow we need to make the front a little bit better too.”
Credit: M-Sport/McKlein
Camilli added “After yesterday, we had to rebuild some confidence over the first few stages but then, step-by-step, we made some good improvements. By the afternoon, we were on the same pace as Mads which is quite good when you consider how much experience he has here.
“I like tomorrow’s stages and I have some more confidence after today so we will try to continue with the same pace and maybe push a little bit more. We know where we lost some time today, so I can learn from that and put it into practice tomorrow.”
