2020 Championship secured!

On the 26th of September, BIKR held the final round of the 2020 Icelandic rally championship. The rally was a short one, spanning a total of 88,8 competitive kilometres. The first couple of stages were driven in the Uxahryggir area where the roads were fast and flowing. The last two stages were through the rough and rocky Djúpavatn. The weather was also a big concern going into the rally, it was going to be very wet, but nobody knew just how wet. We came well prepared like always and were running in 2nd place with no mistakes, we had a decent points gap over second in the championship standings so we found a fast, risk free pace which saw us trailing the leaders by 47 seconds after 4 stages.

The rain really began picking up as the crews arrived at the start of stage 5. Going into the last two stages, I wasn’t sure how much it had rained the night before. Me and Ísak had added puddle markings in our notes, which helped, but I can safely say that I have very seldom driven through a stage as demanding as that one in THAT condition. The puddles were deep and the ground was muddy and slippery.

Looking back I was perhaps driving a bit to aggressively, but the pace was becoming more and more confortable and the car was performing very well in the wet. Approximately 6.8 kilometres into the stage I did a small mistake, we were going through a section of very deep water splashes with one on the right hand side of the road with tracks running slightly off the road and on to the grass on the left. I misjudged my entry into the water and put my right side wheels into the water plash and the right side tires onto the grass. The car immediately spun 90 degrees and went into the grass banking on the right.

Somehow, this resulted in Ísak and me getting stuck in the middle of the mud soaked road. After nudging the car back and forth for 3 minutes we finally managed to work ourselves loose. We had to pull over to the side and fasten our seatbelts loosing a couple more seconds, more importantly we made it quickly to the end of the stage.

At stage end we were not sure what the standings looked like, we just dropped loads of time, Daniel and Erika, our rivals for the Championship had also lost time. We just didn’t know how much, it also did not help that there were a lot of entries in this rally so we figured that we must have fallen back quite significantly. Looking back at the times now, we would have lost the championship if the last stage had been cancelled because we fell into 7thplace overall with Daniel and Erika still narrowly in the lead.

We attacked on the last stage and drove it without doing any mistakes, which resulted in a stage win. Daniel and Erika had even more troubles on the second pass and dropped down to fifth in the standings. We actually managed to overtake them by a mere 2 seconds at the end, that meant that we managed to secure the title after a heart pounding last round!

This whole season has been incredibly demanding for me as well as the whole team. I am truly grateful for their help and support as well as the support of my backers, this sport is incredibly difficult to maintain and it would all be impossible without all these people banding together.

All the times for the last round (Haustrally 2020) can be found here (http://datalink.is)