Novorossiysk: Welcome to… the rain!

Dmitry TAGIROV and Anna ZAVERSHINSKAYA arrived to Novorossiysk just two weeks after winning the National Rally Cup, and their Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX didn’t even leave the Black Sea shores, waiting for the crew. But the Cup is already a part of the history, and the oncoming “Novorossiysk Rally Russia” is the final and deciding round of the most prestigious national rally competitions – the Russian Rally Championship…

  
The “Novorossiysk” rally always attracted the participants and spectators. When in Central Russia autumn is already reigning (and raining) – the teams and their fans from various areas of the country used to come here, to the southern seaside. And the deciding rally of the season was always a regular possibility to catch the final farewell of the summer.
But now Russian Rally Championship suffers not the best of times in the post-crisis situation, and the number of participants is unusually small. But still here are the crews who have to decide the situation in some classes yet (the overall championship title had already gone to Andrew Zhigunov and Igor Ter-Oganesyants) and the overall podium positions. And here are also the crews, who came specially to do namely that event. Dmitry TAGIROV and Anna ZAVERSHINSKAYA belong to the second group, as they are doing their first complete season in the championship and just gaining the experience. Dmitry had done that event only once, and did it… as a co-driver to his friend. Despite of quite good preparations and well-planned strategy for the race – they failed to reach the finish podium, having crashed their Impreza at the final special stage. So, the 2010 edition of “Novorossiysk-Russia” could be named the debut one. And of course, now the main task is to complete the entire route. The distance of the rally was particularly shortened due to the destruction of the roads by torrential rains, which came unexpectedly just before rally start. But still there are more than 180 competitive kilometers to go, that is more than a regular distance of a national championship round (with average distance of 150 special stages kilometers).
The weather seems to become the main trouble for the oncoming event. We already mentioned the cancellation of the part of the competition distance. But also there were serious difficulties for 2WD cars during the recce. The starting ceremony, that took place on the main embankment of the Hero-City of Navy Glory and was planned to be a colorful show with dozens of artificial lights, huge video-panels – was shortened to a modest pass of the cars through the ramp, with the crews not even leaving their vehicles under the rain and wind. Also the spectators’ area at the tricky and winding “Kabardinka” special stage was cancelled. One could remember that in the history of that rally sometimes there were troubles with dust, wind of excessive heat. So, now the nature decided to test men and machinery with water. The safety of driving now seems to be the main weapon in the competitors’ strategies, though speed is also a necessity, as the stakes are high.
Dmitry and Anna are ready for tomorrow start, and the difficulty of the task is only putting their interest to the event on the next level. Scoring the championship points is not the main priority for them that season, but to do a difficult rally, that demands both speed and total control on the situation, the rally with difficult and unpredictable in many places surface, to build a correct strategy in these conditions – is an interesting task itself. They are planning to start the rally in their usual manner: with a cautious pace in the very beginning and further increase of speed as much, as the situation would demand. That approach used to help them many times during that season, so the crew keeps a hope that it would work now, too!

Dmitry Tagirov, the driver: “I had a strong wish to do that rally that could be named a “marathon” one in comparison with other championship rounds. Though it is still shorter, than big international events of world level, but “Novorossiysk-Russia” of 2010 edition would definitely become a serious test for people and their cars. That adds the level of the challenge for us, though even the number of competitors is not so big, but still their level is very high. We can see here the regular participants of domestic championship, the crews who fight for FIA EEZ Cup, the crews with good national and international experience. We managed to win with our Lancer four Cup rounds in a row and keep the car unhurt, even collecting some reserve of tires. So we hope to continue and complete that difficult rally also on a high note! We don’t fight for any points here, but we want to compare the speed we managed to achieve in the second part of that season with such strong rivals, with the crew on the Super-2000 machinery – so these two days would be of great interest for us!”