Gregoire Munster says that he watched on-board videos from Martins Sesks and Adrien Fourmaux during their competition on the first two fast gravel rallies of the season in order to compare their driving style to his as a learning process for Rally Finland.
The driver of Luxemburg has not shown his pace and his speed yet in the season as he is far from the pace of the front-runners compared to his teammate Fourmaux who has finished three times at the lowest place of the podium. Apart from that, Sesks made his WRC debut with the non-hybrid Puma in Poland and immediately impressed everyone with his performance as he set the second-fastest time on Friday morning and was some seconds behind the rally leader Andreas Mikkelsen at the end of this loop. Moreover, Sesks was fighting against the WRC Champions (Kalle Rovanpera, Sebastien Ogier and Ott Tanak) at Rally Latvia as he was inside the top three all the weekend despite the fact that he dropped to seventh at the end of Powerstage after his Puma having suffered from transmission issues. On the other hand, Munster has two restarts under the SuperRally regulations and one DNF so far this season while his best result is the fifth place at Rally Italia Sardegna last month, but the most important thing is that he was not able to match the pace of his rivals in Latvia despite his road position and the fact that he had competed there in the past when this event was part of ERC calendar. In fact, he was in the battle for the eighth place with Thierry Neuville and Esapekka Lappi with the first one having lost time due to the cleaning effect while EP's last outing was Safari Rally Kenya last March. Finally, it must be mentioned that the competition will be very high at Rally Finland this week as Toyota will bring five Yaris Rally1 cars while Lappi and Tanak are the favorite ones from Hyundai to fight for the victory apart from the Toyota drivers: Ogier, Rovanpera and Evans.
"In terms of preparation for Finland, we’ve done some onboard comparisons with Adrien and Mārtiņš from the previous events, and it’s been valuable to learn the differences in driving style and the inputs in terms of braking in order carry to speed through these fast corners", Munster said.
"So, we’ll try to use all that knowledge in Finland and look to get a good result.
"The thing with Finland is that we have some experience here and knowledge of the stages, there are always some new ones here but we can prepare by watching the onboards, so we have some good insight heading into the recce and the rally itself".
Photo Credits: M-Sport
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