Kalle Rovanperä and co-driver Jonne Halttunen will open the road in Rally Sweden on Friday, as the second round of the 2022 FIA World Rally Championship takes place this weekend.
Rovanperä will be the highest-placed driver in the standings (outside of the two-Seb’s), in third position after a great start in Rallye Monte-Carlo last month. His fourth place finish and Power Stage win means Rovanperä will be the first driver to feel the new stages as the rally moves north to unfamiliar territories in Umeå.
Starting his third season for Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, the youngest ever WRC winner has a lot of experience on snow, on his first outting in a Toyota Yaris WRC on snow in 2020, he claimed his maiden WRC podium by finishing third in Sweden and now he will be chasing to become the fourth Toyota driver to win in Sweden since the comeback in 2017.
With the new Toyota GR Yaris Rally1, he now hopes to take home some valuable points and he knows he will face a hard challenge being the one to clean up the stages: “Overall I was really happy with our weekend in Monte Carlo. We started out in a difficult place but we did a lot of work together with the team to improve my feeling in the car. Of course, taking the extra points in the Power Stage means we start first on the road in Sweden and will have some road cleaning to do there on the first day.”
“But we will do our best to take as many points as we can at the end of the weekend and hopefully we can still have a really good rally. In testing we were starting from zero with the snow setup for the new car and it felt a bit tricky to drive in the beginning, but together with our team-mates I think we have made some good steps in the right direction during the two tests.”
