Esapekka Lappi reveals what helped him to continue in Greece on Friday afternoon after his radiator issue and says that he was nt happy at all with the behavior of his i20N on the stages.
The Finn driver dropped three places in total since the superspecial stage and is now fifth overall, just 1.1 seconds behind Elfyn Evans. EP stopped after the end of Stage 4 to repair a minor water leakage as the radiator was licking after an impact he had in SS4. Despite his efforts to fix it for the next two stages, still there was a problem with the radiator and had to fill it with water to keep going until the end of Friday. In fact, apart from the water bottles, he used water even from a restaurant tap. Finally, it must be mentioned that he lost many seconds today compared to his rivals while he managed to be the quickest driver on the first two splits of Stage 6, but eventually he dropped 15,8 seconds from the SS6 stage winner Ott Tanak.
"When we came to the stop line on SS4, we saw the low water pressure alarm and then found the leak", Lappi said.
"I think it's both sides of the radiator which got damaged; we managed to fix the front, but the rear we couldn’t.
"We have been adding water at the stage finishes as well as some other locations – we saw a tap outside a restaurant, so we got some from there as well!
"Regardless, today’s main struggle was not this problem with the car, but more the conditions on the stages.
"I never felt really satisfied.
"We tried something new, but I think we need to go back to my normal set-up.
"Let’s see what we can do tomorrow; today we tried to maximise the grip but we compromised elsewhere, and I didn’t feel comfortable.
"I’d like to take a more cautious approach that allows me to push".
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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