After losing more than half an hour because of the aforementioned troubles, the Citroen Junior Team racer returned to the leading pack with a few impressive Top 8 stage times in the next outings. It all ended however at the end of Stage 7, when he lost control of his Citroen C4 and rolled off several times only meters from the finish line.
Although the car was immediately taken to the Citroen garage and the mechanics started working on it – as the team was to try and get Kimi to return to action on the SuperRally rules – it was confirmed the damage on it was too bad to be fixed. Consequently, it’s rally over for Raikkonen.
“It was very unlucky: the car just slid wide at the end of the stage in a slippery braking area, so we clipped the side of the road and rolled a few times. I had hoped for some good things from this rally, but this was only my seventh event and I am still learning. It’s normal that when you are learning anything you can get caught out by something and this is what happened to me today,” said Raikkonen, according to wrc.com.
“My biggest disappointment is that we’re not able to continue, as I wanted to have as much time in the car as I could. I had a really good feeling earlier and I wanted to push to see what we could do. I’m sure we will come back stronger at our next event though, and while today was disappointing, I’m really enjoying my rally adventure,” added Kimi.
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