Season 2012 is coming to an end, and also the IRC series too. In the coming season onwards, the IRC will be merged into the European Rally Championship. The season finale was scheduled at the city of Limassol, Cyprus. The event is a mixed surface based rally with both gravel & asphalt sections in the special stages. The event is held since 1970 in various championships, including WRC, IRC & MERC. Since 2010, it has been in the IRC calendar & was last won by Andreas Mikkelsen in Skoda Fabia S2000 car.
The event was eventually won by Nasser Al-Attiyah in his new Ford Fiesta RRC, which he will be fielding with two more in the coming WRC season in a WRC addon kit for the same car. Andreas Mikkelsen was pretty much there on his tail until he picked up a puncture in SS10 and dropping couple more minutes but still comfortably finishing in 2nd place. He also let his codriver Ola Floene to drive the last stage of the rally, to give him a feel of the heat of the event on his last outing on a rally car. Japanese, Toshihiro Arai in his Subaru Impreza R4 spec car took the final podium with over 3 minutes to the second placed Mikkelsen.
With this rally, Andreas also won the IRC this season, making it a double to win the IRC for the very first time in the series.
The top 10 timings were like below,
| Pos. | No. |   | Driver / Co-driver Vehicle | Pos. | SS time Penalty | Total time | Diff.Leader Diff.Prev. |
| 1 | 1 |  1 | Al-Attiyah N. / Bernacchini G. Ford Fiesta S2000 | 2 1 | 03:16:25.2 | 03:16:25.2 | 00:00:00.0 00:00:00.0 |
| 2 | 3 | 2 | Mikkelsen A. / Floene Ola Škoda Fabia S2000 | 2 2 | 03:20:00.5 | 03:20:00.5 | 00:03:35.3 00:03:35.3 |
| 3 | 15 | 3 | Arai Toshihiro / Moscatt Dale Subaru Impreza R4 | 2 3 | 03:26:32.3 | 03:26:32.3 | 00:10:07.1 00:06:31.8 |
| 4 | 12 | 4 | Nikara Jarkko / Kalliolepo J. Subaru Impreza R4 | 2 4 | 03:29:07.3 | 03:29:07.3 | 00:12:42.1 00:02:35.0 |
| 5 | 4 | 5 | Wiegand Sepp / Gottschalk Timo Škoda Fabia S2000 | 2 5 | 03:30:25.8 | 03:30:25.8 | 00:14:00.6 00:01:18.5 |
| 6 | 25 | 6 | Savva Savvas / Papandreou A. Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX | 3 1 | 03:32:10.3 | 03:32:10.3 | 00:15:45.1 00:01:44.5 |
| 7 | 17 | 7 | Kremer Armin / Wicha Klaus Subaru Impreza STI | 3 2 | 03:33:17.6 | 03:33:17.6 | 00:16:52.4 00:01:07.3 |
| 8 | 10 | 8 | Vizin László / Zsiros Gábor Škoda Fabia S2000 | 2 7 | 03:35:25.4 | 03:35:25.4 | 00:19:00.2 00:02:07.8 |
| 9 | 23 | 9 | Hunt Harry / Moynihan David Citroën DS3 R3T | 5 1 | 03:35:37.3 | 03:35:37.3 | 00:19:12.1 00:00:11.9 |
| 10 | 29 | 10 | Antoniou S. / "Chips junior" .. Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX | 3 3 | 03:44:53.8 | 03:44:53.8 | 00:28:28.6 00:09:16.5 |
The video highlights of the two day event.
Comments
Post a Comment