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Kalle Rovanpera has said his Rally Estonia domination ended up being “simple” once he knew he could not be caught for the victory.
22-year-old Rovanpera scored thirteen consecutive fastest stage times en route to a crushing 52.7 second win on round eight of the World Rally Championship.
The Finn’s display bore similar hallmarks to that of Sebastien Loeb, who chalked up 12 back-to-back stage wins at Rally Corsica in 2005 before making it thirteen scratch times at Rally Germany three years later with Citroen.
It was Rovanpera’s third Rally Estonia win, and potentially his last for the foreseeable future, as his favourite meeting is being replaced on next season’s schedule by Latvia.
“It is an amazing feeling to achieve our tenth World Rally Championship win here in Estonia and to win this rally for the third time in a row,” said Rovanpera, who now leads the standings on by fifty-five points from Toyota Gazoo Racing team-mate Elfyn Evans.
“For me, it is a really nice rally and one I have always enjoyed. This weekend was something special, winning all the stages from Saturday morning onwards. I think we showed our speed and what the car can do quite well, so I’m really happy.
“We did a good job with Jonne [Halttunen], driving at this speed without really having any moments, and pushing all the time but still enjoying the driving, which is not always the case in rallying.
“I felt happy in the car and I was enjoying the nice stages and the great support we had here. It was also amazing to celebrate with Sato-san [Koji Sato, Toyota’s new President] just after the power stage and on the podium afterwards – he was so happy.”
As the rest of the Rally1 field, led by Hyundai Motorsport’s Thierry Neuville, tried everything within their power to keep the final winning margin respectable, Rovanpera revealed he could have gone even faster had there been a need to.
“On Friday we needed to push quite a lot – there were definitely places where we were on the limit – and when you are opening the road you have to push all of the time,” he explained.
“It is definitely not easy to match the pace of the guys starting behind but yeah, come Saturday morning, we pushed a bit and we found, let’s say, a quite comfortable pace which we could keep up all the time without taking any huge risks, so after that it was quite simple.”
Team boss Jari-Matti Latvala labelled the victory “total domination”, adding: “This is probably the strongest rally for him on the calendar, it’s like a home rally to him and the one he loves to drive the most, and he took the absolute maximum from it which is great for his title defence.”
