Autosportfoto

Loubet impresses with fighting third in ERC1 Junior

Team OSCARO’s Pierre-Louis Loubet claimed his first FIA ERC1 Junior Championship podium following a fighting performance on Rally Islas Canarias.

After a badly worn tyre on stage three caused significant delay, the Corsican battled back into overall podium contention before a time penalty and final-stage off dropped him to fifth overall. Nevertheless, he still did enough to take third in ERC1 Junior, the category for young stars in R5 cars.

“Unfortunately, in the third stage we completely destroyed the front tyre and I don’t know why,” Loubet explained. “At the beginning I was thinking it was mechanical but it wasn’t and it was difficult to recover the time. I then lost a lot of time in the second pass of the long stage on Friday because I was thinking I would destroy the tyre again.”

The 2C Compétition ŠKODA Fabia R5 continued: “I came back to three seconds from the overall podium, then I lost 10 seconds with the jump-start penalty. But I came back to two seconds behind the podium. Unfortunately, in the last stage I took a big push and went out of the road and lost a lot of time. It was a slow-left corner in the middle of the stage, I locked the front tyre and go into a ditch. We tried a lot, we pushed a lot. The podium was the objective and we can be happy with our speed.”

Zdroj: fiaerc.com