Craig Breen and co-driver Gareth Roberts defeated Yeray Lemes in a tight finish to win the fourth round of the 2011 FIA WRC Academy Cup at ADAC Rallye Deutschland this weekend.Breen’svictory ends the seemingly impenetrable winning streak of Estonia’s Egon Kaur and makes him the second man to win a round of the new series for identically-prepared Ford Fiesta R2s running on Pirelli tyres.
Breen walks away from ADAC Rallye Deutschland with 30 Cup points, including five bonus points for his stage wins, under the WRC Academy rule which gives drivers a bonus point for each stage win. The young Irishman’s haul makes a considerable dent in Kaur’s lead in the standings. Kaur, who finished the event eighth in the series, sees his advantage cut from 52 points to 26 with two of six rounds remaining.
The WRC Academy Cup was turned upside down this weekend as the crews took on their first Tarmac event of the season. It was the turn of the Tarmac specialists to prove what they could do and Lemes immediately took to the lead. However,the versatile Breen didn’t intend to let him get away without a fight, but with wins on all but one of the day’s five special stages, Lemes looked set to run away with the rally as he claimed a 32sec overnight lead over the young Irishman.
With Day Two dawning dry, hot and sunny, Lemes might have expected a fairly straightforward run to the win. But a mistake by the Spaniard on SS8, the second stage of the day, threw the Cup Class wide open again. Lemes missed a junction and his 40sec lead over Breen at the start of the stage turned into a 16sec deficit. Having stolen the lead, Breen protected a narrow margin of under 20sec for most of the final day,r efusing to succumb to any pressure as Lemes remounted a challenge for the victory. With the battle for third place between Andrea Crugnola and Jose Suárez, then over a minute behind Breen, it was essentially a two-man race with six stages to go. From SS9 to SS13, Lemes took three stage wins to Breen’s two, setting up their grandstand finish on the daunting, 34km Panzerplatte test. But Breen’s lead of just under 10sec proved more than enough as he defeated Lemes by 05sec on the last of the 14 special stages and stormed home 15.1sec ahead.
OVERALL CLASSIFICATION
01) C. Breen/G. Roberts – 03h 07m 54.0s
02) Y. Lemes/R. Peñate + 15.1s
03) A. Crugnola/M. Ferrara + 01m 43.2s
04) J. Suárez/C. Carrera + 01m 58.2s
05) J. Černý/P. Kohout + 02m 26.0s
06) F. Åhlin/M. Abrahamsen + 03m 08.5s
07) S. Wiegand/C. Harloff + 03m 55.8s
08) E. Kaur/E. Lepikson + 04m 27.7s
09) A. Fisher/Daniel Barritt + 06m 10.3s
10) T. Van der Marel/E. Berkhof + 06m 33.8s