Shakedown: Adventures included!

The Rally Sweden shakedown brought some new adventures for Dmitry and Anna. The first surprise came from... the weather that switched from pleasure for the crews at the recce days to something that could be named very closely to "rallists' hell"! But that was only the first surprise...

    Thursday morning had "welcomed" the crews with the sky completely covered with clouds and the strong snow. It made the visibility quite poor and covered the road with a soft and slippery veil.

The first guests of the team this morning were the photographers, who came to Subaru Team Russia tent even before the crews arrived. The photographers had to make the images for the WRC video game, and as Dmitry and Anna are the regular PWRC competitors now – their car's "avatar" should also appear in that game. So the photographers got the images of all the details of the livery and stickers. Soon the crew's fans would be welcomed to play the game on behalf of the only Russian crew in PWRC! Ooops... we are sorry – the realism seems to be not 100% as the co-driver's voice would be not Anna's but some "standard" one!

Then came the time to start the shakedown, but to get there, covering only 3km of a road section – unexpectedly turned to be a difficult task. Just in 2 kilometers after leaving the service park the tire blew up! It's still to investigate was it the defect of the tire itself or simply the wheel was assembled incorrectly. But any way some time was lost for replacing the wheel.

The shakedown distance itself was also seriously influenced with heavy snow – it was very slippery and the ruts came quite soon. But the experienced drivers still believe that the conditions are good. Petter Solberg called the 2011 Rally Sweden edition "the most true winter one in many years".

But Dmitry Tagirov was not happy with the results of the shakedown. He tried his best to do as much work with car settings, as it was possible, used the shakedown time completely – but still failed to find the settings he could call perfect. In the beginning the car was handling very badly, then the team managed to change some things to improve the handling. But then came quite a long break in test runs. There was a plenty of photographers around the stage and they were in some places in very unsafe positions, namely running across the road in front of the cars. So Dmitry reported about the situation to the marshals, and it seems that he was not the only one to do this as the stage was stopped for approximately 15 minutes. So than came the time for even harder work, as by 2 pm the crew had to be in Karlstad (that is 90 kilometers from the service park) for the continuing of WRC video game photo session – now it came time for the crew with the overalls and helmets. But it was even more difficult situation for Dmitry's teammate Patrik Flodin, as he had to be in Karlstad by 1.30 pm for the pre-start press-conference.