Rally Sardegna – A note from Hayden

It’s great to get a bit of warm sun here in Sardegna as we make our final preparations for this weekends rally. But while it’s pleasant now, it will be uncomfortably hot in the car during the event, with humid air temps up to 35 and up to 50 degrees cabin pressure. However, this is what we train for including my heat acclimatisation training over the past 2 weeks which should help.

We have completed recce – and despite 2/3 of the route being different to last year, the character of the stages is similar. However the stages are a lot rougher this year, with large rocks and ruts already littering the roads. This combined with 2 of the longest days of the championship (Friday and Saturday) and the warm weather – this is going to be the most difficult rally of the year. However we saw in Argentina which had similar road conditions – that when it gets rough it’s a matter of setting a good pace but also looking after the car.

Starting 11th on the road we will have a small advantage from the road sweeping which we hope to make the most of on Friday morning. Other than that we have a plan for the whole event that we will work towards and try and achieve a good result come Sunday afternoon.

Since Portugal we have not had any tests as our Sardegna test was in April. But we have refined the setup from the data we collected in Portugal and now we also have the new paddle gear shift system fitted which is great. Shakedown on Thursday morning will give us our chance to finalise the settings for this rally.

You can check out our pre-rally warm-up video here, where I tried diving for the first time – an experience I throughly enjoyed youtu.be/DRnu-xvgIOs

A huge thanks to everyone for the positive feedback and comments from our Documentary that went live last week – thanks to C Rally. If you have not already seen it, check out this link: youtu.be/86i3PhVkEyc

Thanks, we are looking forward to the rally and will keep you posted. Remember you can find all the links to keep up with the progress of us and this rally at www.haydenpaddon.com

Thanks

Hayden