The forecasters’ rainy Friday prediction  was true – the huge rain watered the race roads from the very morning. The race participants were right too when they had divined the Friday as a hard day.

The Friday race roads were not only slippery but impassable in some places. Muddy gravel, streams of water, deep puddles which in some places were like swamps – under such conditions the crews were forced to think not about fighting with rivals but how to avoid to be a victim of one of the muddy traps or do not destroy their cars by the digged from depths of gravel stones.

In the afternoon the rain stopped and the sky became lighter but it didn’t made the situation easier for the crews. Each other passage of the cars over the race roads made condition of its surface  worse and worse. The drivers complained that on the most muddy and broken sections of the roads their cars became uncontrollable. The greatest victim of bad weather was 12-kilometers special stage Casers. Just on SS Casers the crew of Eurolamp WRT faced their biggest nuisance.

«During morning section the roads were muddy and slippery only but afternoon the track became just awful. The main danger was the stones – there were so many stones on the routs. On SS5 we hit one of those stones and damaged a suspension arm. Moreover we were forced to go to the finish of SS6 with two broken wheel rims… To tell we were happy to be on the finish of the day it was say nothing!» — admitted Vladimir Korsia.

Valery Gorban and Vladimir Korsia changed the broken wheels before the start of the last stage of the day. But because of tough racing schedule they did not have enough time to repair suspension. And in fact the crew overcame last three stages of the day on poorly controlled car. At the finish of last Friday stage Vladimir Korsia in his interview on Rally Radio admitted: «We have hardly survived».

On Saturday all survived participants of Rally de España had to overcome eight tarmac special stages of 140 kilometers in length.