The iconic Acropolis Rally, gathering the fastest rally crews of the world for a competition on gravel stages, begins with an official start ceremony on Thursday evening. The ORLEN Rally Team crew have completed their pre-event preparation and shakedown. Kajetan Kajetanowicz, co-driven by Maciej Szczepaniak, is ready to tackle one of the most specific WRC rounds.
Kajetanowicz and his team used this morning’s warm-up to check the setup of their Škoda Fabia RS Rally2, prepared during pre-event testing session. The ORLEN Rally Team crew face three days of competition on special stages – battling not only against their rivals but also with punishing roads which always take a toll on cars and crews alike. However, the Polish driver has always admitted that he likes Acropolis Rally – which he won three times, including a WRC3 triumph and two victories in the European Rally Championship.
– We have completed the shakedown ahead of Acropolis Rally, everything is checked and works perfectly. The official start ceremony takes place today but proper competition begins tomorrow. The organisers have compressed the rally into three very intensive days – we finish quite late, sometimes shortly before midnight, and start very early. I have competed in the Greek rally of gods six times but this is the toughest edition I can remember. Last year we had plenty of mud during recce and these conditions generally remained throughout the rally. Now there are many loose stones and dips. Some stages are new and very challenging while the ones we already know turned out to be even more damaged, with lots of stones. This rally is very exhausting for crews, for cars but above all for tyres and suspension. However, we are optimistic, the whole ORLEN Rally Team have worked very hard ahead of this rally
– says Kajetan Kajetanowicz, triple European Rally Champion.
Today around 18:00 CET the crews and their cars will pass through the starting gate im Lamia, host city of the rally for the past decade. Real competition begins on Friday (6 September), with the first crews tackling SS1 Ano Pavliani (22.47 kms) shortly before 7:00 CET. Afterwards they will head to SS2 Dafni (21.67 kms) and well-known SS3 Tarzan (23.37 kms), before visiting service zone and repeating the same set of three stages. There are just over 135 competitive kilometres to cover during the opening leg, which makes it the longest day of the rally in terms of total length of special stages. The whole rally consists of fifteen special stages with combined length of almost 305 kilometres.
Starts of Kajetan Kajetanowicz are supported by the title partner of the ORLEN Rally Team – ORLEN S.A., as well as technical partner Delphi, Pirelli, ORLEN OIL, ATC CARGO S.A. and SJS S.A.
