For Eurolamp World Rally Teams it will be fifth visit to Italy. The team began its preparation to this race just after the finish of Rally Portugal. The last part of this preparation was a training session on west coast of Sardinia, near the Oristano town.

A few hundreds kilometers, which had been overcome during the training, obligatorily will be a great addition to the luggage of knowledge accumulated over the past few years. Let us remind, in 2012 Valery Gorban, driving Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX, finished Rally Italia Sardigna on 16th positions of general race classification and on 3rd position in Production category. Next three races were overcome by MINI in WRC2 category, and the last year race was the most resultative of them. Last year Valery Gorban was 18th in general race classification and 10th in WRC2. And it is worthy of note that the last year race was very grinding one.

In 2015 Rally Italia Sardegna began with broken drive-shaft on shakedown and a few mistakes during the first special stage – superspecial, which opened the race on Thursday evening. The next day, during morning section the crew made a little mistake and caught a stone wall. As a result, the radiator was broken, and Valery Gorban and Vladimir Korsia decided to miss leftover stages of the day to save the engine and return to the race on Saturday by Super Rally system.

The huge penalization for missed special stages meant that the crew lost any chance to fight for high result. The maximum that the crew could get out of the situation – it was reliable driving during the rest part of the race and taking the place in top-10 of the final race classification.