People say that the traditionally soft surfaced conditions in Poland are good for DMack, but is that true? Ott Tanak was quietly considering the challenge of Rally Poland the day before the start of the event, and explained what was anticipated as the challenge.
“I don’t know. There are definitely some soft places. In those places it can be better to be running early and not so nice in the rear. Other sections have quite a hard base when is much better to be running further back. The rally is not so soft as it used to be,” he explained.
In any case, the conditions are a far cry from recent rallies like Portugal and Sardinia.
“I can say I’m sure that it is easier for us (on DMack tyres) here than it was in Sardinia and I hope that we can be closer to the front than on the tough rallies.”
As the rally played out one of the major features was the performance of the recently introduced new generation DMack gravel tyres. It was reward for recent development work, not only on these gravel tyres, but on the forthcoming asphalt DMack tyres.
“We have also been doing a lot of work on tarmac tyres. There is still some time before we need to nominate the specification of the tyre for Germany, but we still have time and more development testing planned. It will be interesting to see how far we are when we get to Germany,” Tanak added.
It was interesting to work out if Tanak’s performance in Poland was due to a favourable running order, the new generation of tyre – or his remarkably brave speed on the flat-out stages?
On the Friday evening DMack chief, Dick Cormack, offered an explanation. “When we introduced these new tyres, we targeted Poland and Finland as events where we knew there was a strong chance of setting top times. The development over the last 12 months has been intense.”
- Martin Holmes