The new category of World Rally Championship, WRC Trophy, doesn’t have a lot of contenders yet. There were only two participants of the race for this trophy In Sweden – the crew of Valery Gorban and the crew of Lorenzo Bertelli.

Unfortunately, one of them was out of the race just after the first special stage of Friday. Italian duo didn’t reach the finish of SS2 because of technical issue. As the result, in point of view on the fight for WRC Trophy points, Valery Gorban and Sergey Larens were left alone on the race road.

The crew of Eurolamp WRT was hugging the edge of top-20 positions in the Friday’s special stages’ list of results. The duo had their best result on 16-kilometers SS8, the last stage of the day. Valery Gorban and Sergey Larens occupied 16th row of the list results of that stage. And in the intermediate race classification the Ukrainian-Estonian crew raised up on 19th row.

«We didn’t have any worries today except for a few times when the car skidded. That is quality of winter races – if you touch a snowbank which suck a car you will have only two ways. The best one is the car gone into a spin. The worst one is the race finished deeply in snow trap on a side of the road. Fortunately we escaped the worst one. So all right, the race continues for us», — said Valery Gorban describing his Friday on Rally Sweden.

On Saturday the participants of the second round of World Rally Championship will have to overcome 125 kilometers of 7 special stages.