Joonatan Ylilammi was expected to be one of the favourites on his home ground in Kouvola, but his weekend was not up to his usual high standards.
Leader of the CrossCar category thanks to two consecutive podiums at Tierp on his senior class debut, the young Finn was faced with a very different scenario when the RallyX championship visited Finland.
Only tenth in the intermediate classification in race 1, Joonatan made up for it in the closing stages, securing his ticket to the final top 6 and taking advantage of the collision between Alexander Heum and Riku Huuhka to sneak into fourth place.
“On the first day we didn’t get off to the best start because the engine wasn’t at its best. The same was true for the clutch,’ Joonatan recalls.
“So we decided to change the injectors and things improved a bit.”
Although the 15 points he scored in the first race at Kouvola helped Ronalds Baldins to take the lead in the championship, things didn’t go quite as expected the following day in race 2.
Despite a solid 7th place in Q1, he was only 16th fastest in Q2 before a broken driveshaft saw him drop back to 29th in Q3.
Only 16th in the intermediate classification, the Finn was unable to reverse the trend in the semi-final.
“A stone got stuck in my rack and my steering became very stiff. Add to that the fact that the engine was losing power due to fuel problems, and you can say that our weekend wasn’t an easy one.”
Down to fourth in the standings, 27 points behind Ronalds Baldins, Joonatan Ylilammi knows that he must bounce back at the end of June in Alvsbyn.
