Flash interviews after SS3: No news is good news.

SS3, the second lap over the forest circle of stages was surprisingly uneventful. If not for… the forced retirement of the rally favorite Boris Gadasin. Otherwise the stage didn’t yield much news. Yes – there were mistakes, ruts got bigger, but it was business as usual for the participants. No wonder they weren’t eager to talk after the penultimate stage.

Ruslan Misikov (№212): The second pass was better. There weren’t neither technical problems nor inconvenient with the car. When you are not familiar with your machinery, it can behave inappropriately. Seems like we overcame all the difficulties and were able to increase our pace. I don’t know yet how we perform in comparison to our rivals. But they do have an advantage – for them it’s not the first race at the wheel of their cars, while I saw mine only before the start of the rally. Anyway, it’s not an excuse, we have to drive fast.

Leonid Novitskiy (№200): Good enough! This time we drove a little bit faster, and didn’t make any mistakes. That’s why we were faster than ourselves in the morning on half a minute!

Konstantin Zhiltsov (№203): It was more slippery; some ruts appeared. If you get into one of those, the car might be thrown loose… In addition, the crews in front of me used some insane driving lines – and honestly it’s not my cup of tea! And it was in places where we could go faster and wider, use sideways… I’m not sure, seems like on this one we were 30 seconds faster, but I think it’s not enough. We should have driven faster. But we have one more pass, we’ll see.

Miroslav Janachek (co-driver №218): Like it very much! A very good experience for us!

Alexey Berkut (№202): It was more or less good driving from us.

Alexey Biryukov (№220): Smoothly, consistently, without any surprises. So far so good.

Andrey Novikov (№235): This section wasn’t as easy for us. We overshoot one junction, had to drive backwards. One time we touched a tree. But we improved our result, and that was a surprise for us.

Vadim Nesterchuk (№226): This time we were 8.5 seconds faster, almost caught up with the crew in front. Overall everything was all right.

Photo: Andrey Chursinov, Lina Arnautova