Last weekend Heikki Kovalainen made his debut in the Finnish Rally Championship – we talked about these plans of the former Formula 1 driver.
It cannot be said that Heikki is taking his first steps in rallying, as he won the Japanese championship twice, although not in the most prestigious classes, and generally performed well on the Japanese stage of the World Championship, but in January Arctic Lapland In the rally, which traditionally starts the Finnish rally season, he failed to excel.
The problems started on Friday when he couldn’t keep his Skoda Fabia R5 on the snowy track. Heikki continued to participate in the rally on Saturday, but a good result could no longer be counted on. As a result, Kovalainen and his co-driver Miikka Anttila finished the Arctic Lapland Rally in 27th place.
“The rally was tough for us,” Heikki admitted on his social media pages. – We couldn’t find the right pace, moreover we flew off the track on Friday. But it’s only getting better, so we’re going to prepare for the next race.
There were more difficulties than I expected. I thought we were going to go a little faster anyway. Only intensive training and hard work will help to cope with all this. I have a second race in February, so we will work on the flight technique and hope this will help to gain speed.”
It is worth adding that Kovalainen is not the first ex-Formula 1 driver to try his hand at the snowy circuits of Finnish Lapland. Valtteri Bottas once took part in this rally three times: in his debut race in 2019 he finished fifth, in 2020 ninth and in 2021 eighth.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
