in Acropolis car-breaker
The LMT Rally Team collected two points following their 7th place finish in the Production car World Rally Championship category of last weekend’s Acropolis Rally of Greece. After three tough days, Andis Neiksans and Peteris Dzirkals were delighted to score some points after non-scoring finishes in the previous rounds in Portugal and Italy.
The first day of the Greek event began with some small problems for the Latvian crew. The engine was overheating and they had to drive the whole day with the interior heater on, to provide more circulation for the cooling system. With an ambient temperature of 40 degrees C, this was a nightmare – the interior temperature climbed as high as 70 degrees C! Moreover, they were forced to use safe engine settings without the anti-lag system, which meant a lot of lost time and 10th position in P-WRC after Day One.
With the overheating problems solved for Day 2, Neiksans began to drive faster and ended the day in 6th position. “We were driving very carefully,” he said. “Our mission was to preserve the car and tyres and we did exactly that. It was amazing to watch Saturday’s last service; it was like a war scene! Everyone was rushing around doing extensive repair work on their cars. Our AMP Motorsport mechanics seemed to be the only ones doing routine work. Nothing was broken on the car; we just carried out some suspension arm changes but that was done in every service – that is the nature of the Acropolis rally.”
The third day began with a slim 17-second advantage over 7th placed Portugese driver Bernardo Sousa for the LMT team and before the last special stage, this had grown to 23 seconds. The team put four used tyres on for the last loop and had taken two new ones as spares. Unfortunately, the jack failed during the tyre change before the last stage, so Neiksans had to start the stage with one used tyre on. That proved to be a decider in the battle with Sousa, as the used tyre was completely worn out by mid-stage and Neiksans had to drive super-carefully not to puncture it. By the end of the rally, Sousa had turned the deficit into a 13-second advantage over the Latvian crew, demoting them to 7th.
“It would have been great to finish ahead of Bernardo but we had this problem with the tyre. By pushing hard we would have risked a puncture and that could potentially mean retirement, as we no longer had a jack. A third non-score in a row would have been a disaster. We are happy with 7th place because now we are tied 7th in the overall standings and are still the highest-placed P-WRC rookies. Now we will have a long break – we will only return to P-WRC action at the end of October in Great Britain. Until then we will do two rounds of the Latvian National Championship – we have not competed in Latvia so far this year!” said Neiksans.
