“It’s never clever to make a mistake” — Ogier reflects on Rally Italia Sardegna 🇮🇹
Once again, Rally Italia Sardegna 2019 has proved to be an unsuccessful event for Citroën Racing. The team have had no podium places since 2014.
Even with six times world champion, Sébastien Ogier behind the wheel, the ‘Italian jinx’ persists for the French team.
Reflecting on a difficult weekend, Sébastien Ogier said:
“On Friday morning, as expected, we were limited by the road conditions as front-runners and were already a bit behind in the standings, even though in the end the time gap wasn’t that big. But everything came to an end in SS5 when we hit a rock. It’s never clever to make a mistake, but I must admit that’s particularly true in this case, because I knew that rock was there. Basically, in view of the profile of the road with a little crest and given the phase of acceleration we were in at that point, I couldn’t see it and a slightly poorly judged trajectory was enough to put us out.”
“From that point on we didn’t have much to hope for apart from continuing to rack up kilometres in the car. Even then things didn’t work out ideally, because on Saturday morning we had another little knock. This time we were deceived by a small step on the roadside, in a new section, that I hadn’t noticed during the recce. I managed to patch it up so we could get back to the service park and continue driving normally in the afternoon, knowing that the consequences at that point wouldn’t be so serious.”
“Our only remaining objective was the Power Stage, even though running first among the WRC limited our hopes. But with a strong attack we managed to get four points and we can be satisfied with that. And if we examine the outcome of this weekend in terms of the championship, which had looked very negative at one point, it’s not so bad in the end, due to Ott’s bad luck. Honestly, I don’t get any pleasure from that because he put in a great performance and he deserved better, but that’s rallying. Now it’s time for some holidays to recharge the batteries and then we meet again in Finland, ready to resume combat!”
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