Rally de Portugal, next round of World Rally Championship, will be very important for Eurolamp WRT.

Our crash during Rally Mexico and ensuing absence in Argentina gave a head start to our rival teams. So Eurolamp WRT must certainly obtain good result on Portuguese race. Such moods the team held all along the training.

A place for the training had been chosen in the context of flitting stages of forthcoming Rally de Portugal to the North of country. Portuguese partners of the team had selected training stages close to Amarante city in Porto district. And they offered to Valeriy Gorban’s crew a various package of possible roads – with different surfaces and different grade of curves – the team could face during Rally de Portugal with.

It is worthy to note that the weather had set a seal on the training. It was raining nearly every day during team’s work. So the team had a good opportunity to collect a lot information about behaviour of MINI John Cooper Works S2000 in wet conditions and to work with wet tires and car setting. Valeriy Gorban had covered almost 500 training kilometers in all.

Valeriy Gorban, Eurolamp WRT driver: «It is hard to say now whether it is good or not that training sessions were so rainy. If Rally de Portugal is rainy all collected data would be useful. Even if race is dry our Portuguese training would play important role to take a good result. Because we not only checked setting of the car and experimented with tires but worked with a lot of other irrespective of weather tasks which could help us to have good races».

Rally de Portugal, fifth round of World Rally Championship, will be held less than in a month – in May 21…24.