Ott Tanak says that he was very unlucky after his having collided with a deer in Stage 2 of Rally Poland and reveals that he could do nothing to avoid this situation as everything happened very quickly.
The Estonian driver was leading Rally Poland after the end of the superspecial stage at Mikolajki Area which was held on Thursday night. He was one of the favorite drivers who would be able to win Rally Poland this year as he is very familiar to fast gravel rallies since his country has this type of roads. However, he was forced to stop 18.3 Km into Stage 2 as he collided with a deer which jumped suddenly in front of his car. He and Martin Jarveoja managed to complete Stage 2 and arrived at the stop control after nine minutes, but they decided to retire for the rest of Friday as their car carried a terminal damage. In addition to that, Tanak's i20N carried a new engine for Rally Poland and the Estonian crew did not want to fix the damaged radiator in case of their making further damage to the new engine and preferred to retiring. The Hyundai mechanics were able to fix the damaged car of Tanak at the midnight service and he restarted today under the SuperRally regulations.
"It was really bad luck for us yesterday", Tanak said.
"Looking back at the onboard, we were on a straight section but the time between the deer emerging from the bush and the impact was only 0.26 seconds.
"There was no time to react and avoid the situation.
"The opening stage with very loose gravel wasn’t the easiest, but we felt okay in the car for those first kilometres".
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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