Sweden : Aimont Racing - Leg 2Gigi Galli and Giovanni Bernacchini in Citroen Xsara WRC prepared by PH Sport and run by Aimont Racing Team, are at the end of the second leg and 15 special stages of Rally Sweden, second round of the championship.
The second leg of
the Swedish Rally started this morning at 05.45 from Karlstad with a temperature of – 8°C and for Gigi Galli it has been a catching up race, his times in the special stages kept improving. The first of the SEVEN today's special stages was SS Lesjofors, 10.49 km a very narrow and technical stage with a fast last section. Gigi Galli and his co-driver Giovanni Bernacchini started with a good pace but not pushing too much.
The next stage, Liljendal, 34.54 km long, the longest of the entire rally, was a mixture of old and new. The first 22 km were brand new and after that there was twisty section that has been used in the past. Here Galli pushed his Citroen Xsara a little bit more and obtained a good tenth time in the stage and going up the leaderboard.
At this point the crew of the Aimont Racing felt more confident and after a 30 minutes service park, tackled the next two stages, that has been run yesterday as well, aggressively, improving constantly their times in the stage, obtaining a ninth and a eighth fastest time respectively.
The SS Vargasen, 24.
63 km long, that the crews already disputed yesterday, is quite famous in Sweden thanks also to the “Colin's Crest” jump, so there were hundreds of fans and spectators along the route, tramping in the snow to get a good place. In the second pass on this stage Gigi Galli improved his time of yesterday.
Towards the end of SS13 Fredriksberg, 24.74 km long, a brake pipe broke on Galli's Citroen Xsara, therefore he had to run carefully through the next stage.
Before the last short stage of the day, SS Hagfors Sprint (1.87 km), that has been disputed at the end of yesterday's leg too, Galli stopped trying to fix the problem, but he didn't succeed, therefore the timed scored in the last test was very high.
“I have to say that the day was a positive one,” said Galli at the end of the leg. “We run fine without taking too many risks, driving smoothly and we hit our purpose that was getting to know the car better. We made a few successful changes on the car. It's a pity we had that problem with the brakes. We want to finish this race with as much experience we can in order to enter Rally Norway in the best way."
Source Aimont Racing
