Rally Japan, the final encounter of the 2024 World Rally Championship, started at the Toyota Stadium. The crews competed head-to-head on a 2.15-kms special stage, watched live by thousands of spectators in the grandstands. Kajetan Kajetanowicz and Maciej Szczepaniak showed good pace right from the beginning of the Asian WRC round, setting fourth-fastest time in the WRC2 Challenger classification and fifth-fastest in the WRC2 standings!
Short superspecial stage brought usual excitement to huge crowd of rally fans. Spectacular slides around barrels and jumps always impress, with two cars competing head-to-head. Although this test did not reflect the difficulty of proper special stages of this rally, it was an interesting introduction to the competition. Kajetanowicz and Szczepaniak showed good pace on this stage, focusing now on the battle which starts on Friday morning (Thursday night European time).
– This is our another visit in Japan and I am happy, I enjoy coming back to this country. The atmosphere is great, thousands of fans follow our battle. We also had a beautiful opening ceremony of the final championship round at the Toyota Stadium. With loud cheering from the grandstands, we completed a short superspecial. It was just a teaser ahead of proper competition – twisty and narrow stages, mostly in the woods, await us tomorrow. For sure it will be very slippery, with leaves on the road in unexpected places, Right now the weather is beautiful and it’s dry but it can get very unpredictable here. Basically, irrespective of conditions, Rally Japan is a tough challenge
– Kajetan Kajetanowicz, the ORLEN Rally Team, commented after the opening stage.
Eight special stages await the crews on Friday: two runs of Isegami’s Tunnel (23.67 kms, starts at 23:44 and 5:32 CET), Inabu/Shitara (19.38 kms, at 0:44 and 6:32 CET), Shinshiro (17.41 kms, at 2:21 and 8:00 CET) and Okazaki SSS (2.54 kms, at 10:34 and 10:44 CET).
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.
Rally Japan, unofficial results after SS1 (WRC2 Challenger):
- Gryazin/Aleksandrov (Citroën C3 Rally2) +1:48.9
- Pajari/Mälkönen (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +2.0
- Kovalainen/Kitagawa (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +2.1
- Kajetanowicz/Szczepaniak (Škoda Fabia RS Rally2) +2.2
=. Ingram/Kihurani (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +2.2 - Solans/Sanjuan (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +2.4
- Kogure/Luhtinen (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +2.8
- Arai/Matsuo (Škoda Fabia R5) +4.9
- Chwist/Heller (Škoda Fabia RS Rally2) +5.9
=. Yamamoto/Salminen (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +5.9
