Richard Thompson column: Bitter disappointment for Kosciuszko
Motorsport Italia team engineer, Richard Thompson reflects on Rally Argentina where Michal Kosciuszko failed to finish after damaging the suspension on his MINI John Cooper Works WRC car in the first test on Friday morning...
Hello everyone, Tomo here again for the last time from Rally Argentina.
Day Two started well with some great splits compared to Martin Prokop and local star Gabriel Pozzo. Michal started at a strong pace and had an advantage of nearly 24 seconds over both of them at the third split. However, disaster struck when Michal suffered suspension damage on the right side on his MINI John Cooper Works WRC. Unfortunately, it put him out of the rally due to irreparable damage. We are all bitterly disappointed, but we'll soon shake it off as Greece isn't too far away.
The technicians are busy preparing the practice and rally car as well as the container for the trip to Oz. Our car here in Argentina does all the long haul events without returning to Europe. It's more cost-effective to do it that way as we avoid hefty flight charges for the car. Paying for excess baggage is painful, so imagine paying for a 1200kg rally car to go to Australia!
Argentina is our second rally of a group of three linked events in terms of technical regulations, so we do need our transmissions, turbos and suspension parts to go to Greece. They need to come off the car here today. The boys will do that while I debrief with Michal and [co-driver] Maciek [Szczepaniak] later. It's an informal meeting to discuss all aspects of the weekend from the hotel, recce, catering etc to the rally and everything that goes with it, alongside looking forward to forthcoming tests and events.
We have a small team, I'm British, Michal and Maciek are Poles, Bruno [di Pianto] of course is the boss, and is from near Milan, Jack [de Keijzer] the co-ordinator is from the Netherlands and the techs are all Italian. We really are a tight little group that gets on really well, which is so important, we work hard and give 100 per cent, but we also have a laugh. Long may it continue!
That's all for now,
Tomo
