Both Robert Virves and Teemu Suninen felt they deserved to win Rally Finland. Both appreciated that the other would have, too.
In the end, the WRC2 battle was largely decided by two important times: a notional, and a penalty.
Prior to SS17, where Sébastien Ogier crashed, Virves had been leading Suninen by 24.7 seconds. But when the notional times were applied following the cancelation of the stage, suddenly Suninen was in the lead by 0.9s.
Virves was the first car onto the scene of Ogier’s accident, but notional times account for that stoppage. So why did he lose so much time?
“At the beginning I had some issue with a sensor in the car,” Virves told DirtFish.
“I don’t know how many kilometres we drove, but the first kilometers I was driving quite slowly and trying to figure out the issue. So once it was fixed, we started to drive and then the stage was red flagged.”