Welcome to Issue 118 of HANDRAKES & HAIRPINS, your favourite free source rallying entertainment.
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The 2010 season of the World Rally Championship (WRC) starts in a week’s time with the snow and ice WRC Rally Sweden. With a whole new championship to follow (the S2000 World Cup) as well as the regular WRC, J-WRC and P-WRC championships, 2010 is set to be a rally enthusiasts dream… Petter Solberg has fought his way into owning a competitive rally car, that of a Citroen C4 WRC 2009-spec. He will most certainly be hounding the likes of Sebastien Loeb (Citroen Total World Rally Team) and Mikko Hirvonen (BP Ford Abu Dhabi World Rally Team) from as early as Round One. Another Finn in WRC is Kimi Raikkonen (driving for the Citroen Junior Team), and he will hoping to stick with the front runners in his Citroen C4 WRC.
Leading up to the build-up of this first round of the World Rally Championship for 2010, Petter Solberg, Raikkonen and Sordo, as well as Marcus Gronholm, have been preparing for the Swedish snow by competing in local Norwegian and Finnish snow rallies. You can read all about their efforts inside Issue 118 this week.
A South African co-driver legend, Douglas Judd, will be hanging up his helmet as he retires from the BP Volkswagen Polo S2000 Rally Team. A winner of six premier class National Rally Championships, Judd is one of the country’s top navigators. HANDBRAKES & HAIRPINS pays tribute to this legend.
Travis Pastrana and co-driver Christian Edstrom powered to victory in this past weekend’s Sno*Drift Rally, the opening round of the 2010 Rally America series. His former Subaru Rally Team USA team-mate and now arch-rival Ken Block (Monster World Rally Team) went head-to-head in the early stages of the rally, but this fight ended prematurely as Block’s new Ford Fiesta rally car suffered a mechanical problem. This event report is inside Issue 118 this week.
The lead story, and an EXCLUSIVE for readers of HANDBRAKES & HAIRPINS, is Martin Brady’s account of his IRC Monte Carlo Rally experience. In this the final part of the two-part series, Brady and his team at Barry Motorsport (driven by Daniel Barry in his Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX) bravely fight all the Monte can throw at them to finish a highly respectable and impressive 21st overall. Read the second part of this fantastic story only in HANDBRAKES & HAIRPINS this week!
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As always, please enjoy this week’s read!
Yours in Rallying,
Evan Rothman