Dani Sordo (Citroën), fastest in the Salou Shakedown

(24/10/2013)

Dani Sordo (Citroën). RallyRACC 2013

Today the shakedown kicked off the 49th RallyRACC Catalunya-COSTA DAURADA, Rally de España 2013, penultimate round of the FIA World Rally Championship that will start on Friday 25th and end on Sunday, October 27th. Although the shakedown is just a testing stage and the times are not used to establish the starting order for the first day, most of the teams went through this short 2.21km stage several times and there was a lot of activity to prepare the cars’ set-up.

The fastest time was for Dani Sordo (Citroën/1’22”7), who passed four times through the staged, followed by the Volkswagen drivers Jari-Matti Latvala (1’22”9), Sébastien Ogier (1’23”0) and Andreas Mikkelsen (1’23”3), and the first two Fords, Evgeny Novikov (1’24”2) and Thierry Neuville (1’24”3). The activity at the Emprius area in Salou, completely on asphalt, will continue until late in the afternoon, as after the priority drivers it will be the turn for the non-priority and the private.

A Friday full of activity
Tomorrow, Friday, will be the first day of full competition, that will be short in the sporting aspect, but very intense, as although the cars will not start from the Barcelona Cathedral’s staircase until 18.00h, many drivers will be doing a lot of activities closer to the public, such as the autograph signing session (16.00h), presentation (17.20h), group photo (17.30h) and an exhibition of the cars in the parc fermé (from 15h). Furthermore, Luis Moya, two-times World Champion with Carlos Sainz, will give a lecture at the Architects Association explaining to the fans how it is a World Championship (16.15h).

In the sporting area, tomorrow’s night stages will be difficult. There will be three stages: Querol (21,26 km, 20.03h), El Montmell (24,14 km, 20.44h) and Riudecanyes (16,35 km, 22.45h), with the arrival to the Service Park in PortAventura scheduled at 23.22h. The 49th RallyRACC will have 1,389.5 km of total distance, 355,92 of them timed, distributed in 15 timed stages, 2 of them of mixed gravel-asphalt, 4 more on gravel and 9 on asphalt.

Information and live times on www.rallyracc.com “rally online”