Takamoto Katsuta reveals that he copied Ott Tanak's tyre strategy on the first day of Croatia Rally with the view of catching Pierre-Louis Loubet on the leaderboard.
The Japanese finished sixth overall at Croatia Rally, but many drivers did not know what tyre choice was the best one for Friday afternoon as the weather forecast showed rain on the stages, therefore some of them put wet tyres on this loop. Katsuta was among them that chose to run with wet tyres, but eventually this strategy did not pay off as the most part of the stages was dry. Generally, he stayed out of trouble throughout all the weekend apart from a moment he had in Stage 5 where he had a spin while his main rival was Loubet as they were fighting for the sixth place overall. Last but not least, it must be mentioned that he was in front of Kalle Rovanpera and Sebastien Ogier as his teammates dropped time after stopping to change a wheel in SS2, but eventually both of them overtook Katsuta on Sunday.
"I just wanted to check what Ott had, because he was behind me on the road", Katsuta said.
"Pierre-Louis was behind me, and he started to change his tyres.
"I was thinking, ‘why is he changing tyres?’, and he was putting wets on.
"In this moment we didn’t have any phone signal because we were in a very deep forest, so we didn’t know how bad the weather would be.
"When I looked and saw Ott was putting his wets on, I thought, 'okay, this must be something'.
"Already in the previous stage I had spun and lost like 10 seconds or something, so I had nothing to lose.
"It works sometimes, it didn’t work this time, but it was worth a try".
Source: wrc.com
Photo Credits: Toyota
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