Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by FIA World Rally Championship
The two traditional highest branches of international motorsport, Formula 1 and WRC, use vehicles that are significantly different from those that regular people drive on the road. In the case of WRC, these may look like souped-up versions of road-going cars, but there is more to that. So, how do you drive one of these?
Luckily for us, Julian Porter, the presenter of the WRC+ All Live and former rally driver, managed to have one-on-one tuition with Oliver Solberg. The two got inside a Hyundai i20 N rally car of the Rally2 class and had a go on closed-off sections of a road in Finland.
Before getting a chance to get behind the wheel of Hyundai's proposal for the Rally2 class, the presenter got in the navigator's seat of the i20 N to see how Petter Solberg's son does his magic on a gravel stage. As you may notice, Oliver makes this seem easy.
Once Oliver shows Julian how things are done, the two switch seats, and the former rally driver turned presenter gets behind the wheel of a racecar for the first time in many years. As a reference, Julian Porter's last competitive outing in a rally car took place in 1999, when he raced a Ford Escort Maxi Kit Car in Great Britain.
According to Oliver's explanation, the new generation of WRC cars is easier to drive than its predecessors. However, as Julian points out, the gravel becomes slippery once you leave the racing line. This makes sense, as the most used lines through a turn will have more wear to them, and the surface will be different outside that line.
What is even more fun to notice is the fact that Oliver Solberg's mother, Pernilla Walfridsson-Solberg, raced against Oliver's guest back in the 1990s. She stopped competing back in 2000, one year before giving birth to Oliver Solberg.
Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland. Full profile
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