Kimi crashes

http://www.specialstage.com/2010/01/29/kimi-raikkonen-craches-in-his-wrcar-debut/

Finland’s 2007 Formula One champion Kimi Raikkonen has crashed on his first competitive event driving for the Citroen Junior World Rally Team.

Raikkonen was placed second overall in the Arctic Lapland Rally when his car left the road and crashed into a tree on the event’s second stage, the 23km Aittajarvi.

Kimi and co-driver Kaj Lindstrom were unhurt in the incident, but their C4 World Rally Car sustained damage to its right-hand front corner. With help from spectators the pair eventually got the car back on the road and underway again, but the episode cost them more than 15 minutes on the stage, and more than 20 minutes of penalty time.

The team is hopeful that once the car is repaired in service, Raikkonen will be able to continue in today’s competition.

Raikkonen and Lindstrom are tackling the winter event, the opening round of the Finnish championship, as a warm-up before their WRC campaign kicks off in Sweden on 11 February.

It is the first competitive outing for the duo in the Citroen C4 World Rally Car they will campaign this season. However it’s not a new event for the pair, who made their rally debut together there in 2009, finishing 13th in a Fiat Abarth Grande Punto S2000.

Before the crash, Raikkonen had got off to a good start. In perfect snowy conditions, and in a temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius, he recorded the second fastest time though Friday’s opening stage, the 11.27km Rantasipi Pohjanhovi / Mantyvaara. The only man to beat him – by a margin of 5.5sec – was his fellow Citroen C4 driver, Dani Sordo, who is also using the event as a pre-season test.

After two stages, Sordo, now the sole World Rally Car driver in the predominantly Group N field, leads the rally by 26.1sec from the Estonian, Ott Tanak.

 

Each special stage is given a conservative boogie time, usaully a time any streetcar can drive the stage at non-race speed. There is also time given to complete the following transit section (either to next stage arrival control, service, or finish). Codrivers add the stage boogie time and the transit time to the start time of the stage to get the arrival time to that next stage or service or finish main time control.

If you stuff it or have mechanical issues on the stage, you lose stage time and risk being late for next control. Penalities are 10 or 12 seconds per minute lateness. (If the codriver screws up and checks into a control early, its a minute penalty per minute early.)

Besides penalyies for lateness, teams can be declared maximum permitted lateness (usually 30 minutes per leg) and excluded. This prvents the rally from becoming too spread out and keeps the sweep teams (fast sweep starts just after last rally car and insures that there are no medical emegencies and slow sweep after that which uprights rolled cars, pulls cars outta the weeds and may tow car to stage finish or to service or give driver and/or codriver ride to next service.

Can't comment on RAC, but there has been many rallies not offering recce (passes to make pacenotes) usually due to concerns of local communities or rarely environmental concerns. In US and Canada, all rallies were 'blind tulip' rallies until ~2001 in which teams were given a routebook of small diagrams of only the navigational junctions and hazardous or 'out of the norm' instructions. The could be miles that the codriver had no instructions to call.

Some rallies and entire championships have been run on organizer supplied stagenotes. Everyone runs on the same notes, often w/o a recce pass to edit them. The US did this for around 7 years. It helped control cost (no reccecar, gas, extra hotel nights) and less days required per event in a large country where if you were competing in the National championship, you'd already be spending all your vacation just towing to the rallies.
Stagenotes are much like pacenote but subjectively written just to describe the characteristics of the road whereas pacenotes written by a team are written more towards the raceline for the specific car they are rallying.