An army of fourteen cars utilized fuel from VP Racing Fuels at this year’s Rallye Monte Carlo. Only about more than half of the competitors made it to the coveted finish line of the world’s most famous rally; this time 2WD cars were more successful.
This year, the famous Rallye Monte Carlo celebrated the centenary of its first year and a substantially large crew of more than a hundred appeared at the start of the rally after some time. Many cars such as the Renault Clio R3, Citroen C2R2, Renault Twingo R2, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X and the Peugeot 207 Super 2000 were powered by fuel from VP Racing Fuels. Traditionally, the Proton Satria Neo Super 2000 arouses the greatest expectations and curiosity from spectators but this time it was unable to break the bad luck streak of its performance in the IRC. Not even the deployment of star drivers helped. Australian Atkinson was halted right at the beginning due to electronic technical glitchs and Per-Gunnar Andersson, who had a promising initial run, made an error in Stage 2 and had to withdraw from the rally.
“About five kilometers into the second stage, there was a double right-hander into a left, the car slid a little wide, there was a big stone hiding under the leaves; we hit the stone and broke the front-left wheel rim, which caused us to have a puncture, soon after one of the arm’s broke on the car and the wheel turned out” sadly remarked the sympathetic Swede. However, they got a chance to correct their mistakes as they signed a contract with the Proton Team for the rest of the season: “The Satria is a great car and to have the chance to be working with a manufacturer like Proton is very good news for me, I have every confidence that working with Chris and the whole of Proton we can really make a very good year in 2011.”
Competitors with 2WD had many more reasons to be content, especially favored youths Pierre Campana and Andrea Crugnola who were leading the rally. They achieved the best time in seven of the twelve measured sections (stage 4 was canceled for them). Their vehicle’s R3C category received a great opponent in the rapidly-growing R3T category, nevertheless the atmospheric cars (and especially the pilots) managed to eliminate the absence of the turbo on the difficult tracks. After opening day, the talented Crugnola, with Campana is his shadow took the lead with on the rest by many tenths of seconds. Corsican Campana then lost three minutes thanks to a defect on the first stage of the second day, but this did not help Crugnola who after technical problems in Stage 8 finally lost hope of winning. Campana earned third place admist the 2WD vehicles after Thursday’s events and thanks to a fantastic performance on the final day, he managed to close in on a two-minute loss to a rival and deservedly won both the 2WD category and Class 5. “I am extremely happy with this result and with our performances throughout the three days” rejoiced the 25-year-old Corsican. “The car was exceptional so I’d like to say thanks to the Munaretto team for their hard work. We also benefitted from the support of Ellip6 and I would like to extend my thanks to them for all they have done to support my career up to this point. This result is the best possible way to start 2011 season!”
Besides Campana and Crugnola, other cars powered by VP Racing Fuels managed to successfully navigate through the difficult track. Frenchman Raoux finished seventh in Class 5 behind Crugnola and Italian Freguglia was fourteenth in the same category among 21 cars at the finish. In the heavily-occupied Class 3, Frenchman Carret finished fifth and even Italian Settembrini made it to the end in Class 2. We learned about the course of events in Class 6 from Martin Popilka, representative of Fresh Energy, SE, which is responsible for the distribution of VP Racing Fuels: “From the beginning, we were particularly interested in Stéphan Pellegrin who took the lead at the end of the first stage. But he lost it at the end of Thursday’s demanding events. The final stage was marked by his near-successful pursuit. However, his rival Lefebvre came to us in the refueling zone before the final stage. He asked if he could use our fuel which served his opponent’s car so well. And you see – in the last stage, he managed to stop the attack by Pellegrin and eventually won by less than a second! Otherwise, as far as our assessment of the Monte Carlo Rally goes, we are very glad we all managed logistically and that we could lift the burden of worry and the responsibility of refueling for the teams. In the beginning, we were a little disappointed by the imminent resignation of the Proton Team and Andreas Aigner but our mood improved by the end of the rally and especially with the results of Stages 5 and 6. In particular, the performance of the famous Pierre Campana - Sabrina De Castelli crew in the final phase allowed us to forget our initial disappointment. I would like to congratulate them very much on their primacy in this difficult rally where it was important to find an ideal compromise between speed and reliability under difficult conditions! Even for us, Monte Carlo was a great start to a challenging year in which we will again be assisting in many series headed by the IRC. ”
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