Image by Etherington/LAT
Bottas wins stage on rally debut
While Fernando Alonso was grabbing headlines with his Rolex 24 performance, Valtteri Bottas was also picking up a victory of sorts in a slightly more low-key rally appearance.
Bottas was making his rally debut in the Arctic Lapland Rally in Rovaniemi in his home country of Finland over the weekend, driving a Ford Fiesta WRC run by M-Sport, and showed impressive pace alongside co-driver Timo Rautiainen - the man who called the pace notes for Marcus Gronholm’s World Rally Championship titles in 2000 and 2002.
The Mercedes driver picked up a stage victory on stage eight - Mantyvaara 3 - by 2.3 seconds, and also had two other top-three stage finishes in an impressively consistent performance that saw him finish every stage in the top 10.
The end result was Bottas finishing fifth overall, a little over two minutes adrift of winner Emil Lindholm over the 10 stages.
Bottas wasn’t the only F1-related name taking part in this weekend’s rally, with former Ferrari driver Mika Salo - now often an FIA steward at grands prix – finishing 11th overall, 13 minutes off Lindholm.
Chris Medland
While studying Sports Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris managed to talk his way into working at the British Grand Prix in 2008 and was retained for three years before joining ESPN F1 as Assistant Editor. After three further years at ESPN, a spell as F1 Editor at Crash Media Group was followed by the major task of launching F1i.com’s English-language website and running it as Editor. Present at every race since the start of 2014, he has continued building his freelance portfolio, working with international titles. As well as writing for RACER, his broadcast work includes television appearances on F1 TV and as a presenter and reporter on North America's live radio coverage on SiriusXM.
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