After Rally del Paraguay, Kajetan Kajetanowicz and Maciej Szczepaniak, together with the entire ORLEN Rally Team, moved to the western part of South America. The next round of the 2025 World Rally Championship season takes place in Chile and the Polish crew have been intensively preparing for this event.
Tegoroczna rywalizacja w WRC rozgrywana jest na czterech kontynentach. Dwie z czternastu wpisanych The 2025 World Rally Championship is taking place on four continents. Two of the fourteen rounds in the calendar are scheduled for South America. The crews have already completed the event in Paraguay and this new point on the world rally map will be remembered by the competitors thanks to its magnificent setting, challenging and unique special stages and exceptionally warm welcome for the crews – including, of course, Kajetan and Maciek.
In recent days, the entire rally circus moved to Chile. The country with the largest length-to-width ratio in the world appeared for the first time in the WRC schedule in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic and political turmoil led to the cancellation of subsequent editions of the event, which returned to the calendar in 2023. The stages, set between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, which are particularly beloved by Chileans, are technically challenging, with surface which is unforgiving to tyres, “eating” them at an alarming rate.
Kajetanowicz and Szczepaniak are set to start their sixth event in their 2025 programme. After an unfortunate setback in Paraguay, the ORLEN Rally Team crew began another busy week of rallying with full motivation. On Monday, the Poles completed a testing session, adapting their Toyota to the demands of the Chilean stages and checking the tyre life on the aforementioned rough gravel.
We are in Chile, just before the next round of the World Rally Championship in South America. We have just completed successful tests. My goal was to find the optimum setup for the changing grip, which is obviously not easy. On special stages you have to anticipate what’s coming, you have to read how slippery or how grippy it is. You need a favourable car setup in order to get that feeling right from the start. I think we have managed to achieve it but we will have to confirm it during the rally itself. The weather forecasts are currently ambiguous, so anything can happen. We are optimistic. The atmosphere in South America is incredible, people love rallying here. We know this from Paraguay – and in Chile we are also feeling welcomed and we are hearing plenty of warm comments
– Kajetan Kajetanowicz, the 2023 WRC2 Challenger champion, said before Rally Chile.
Kajetan and Maciek will spend the next two days on recce. This year’s Rally Chile route consists of sixteen special stages, covering a total distance of nearly 307 kilometres. Shakedown and official start ceremony are scheduled for Thursday. The competition in round eleven of the 2025 WRC season begins on Friday.
Starts of Kajetan Kajetanowicz are supported by the title partner of the ORLEN Rally Team – ORLEN S.A., as well as technical partner Delphi and ORLEN OIL.
