Germany's Rallye Deutschland, round nine of the World Rally Championship and only the second asphalt event for Red Bull's former Grand Prix champion Kimi Raikkonen, is well-known for providing three days of stark contrasts. What else do you expect from a country that boasts over 1500 different types of sausage? The average German gets through more than 30 kilos of sausage annually, meaning that it would take only 41 people to eat the equivalent weight in sausages of Kimi's Citroen C4 World Rally Car in one year.
Some of the types of sausage available in Germany would not be to everybody's taste. Gehirnwurst is a sausage made mostly out of pig's brain. Or alternatively there is Hertzwurst, for those who prefer pig's heart. And then you get some quite unexpected ingredients too. Weisswurst, for example, is a sausage whose constituents include cream and eggs.
For Kimi, the diet today was made up of six tough asphalt stages around Trier, where the Rallye Deutschland has traditionally been based. 'The Iceman' started the day's action eighth on the road - and that proved to be slightly problematic for him as the stages went on. With so many leading competitors in front, Kimi had to cope with a large amount of stones and loose gravel thrown up onto the road that made the surface extremely slippery and unstable.
On only his second World Championship asphalt rally, it wasn't easy for him to find the right braking points compared to the other more experienced drivers. Nonetheless, 'the Iceman' kept his cool. At the end of the first day he was eighth: comfortably in the points and with only a small gap to the person in front. There's still a long way to go and everything left to play for.
"Even before coming here, I knew that Germany would be the most difficult of the asphalt rallies because it is very specialised, and I was certainly right about that," said Kimi. "It's quite a strange rally, because each one of the three days is very different and has its own specific things. Here you need experience, so the main thing for me is obviously to get to the finish. It helps if you have a very good feeling for these roads, like Sebastien Loeb who has won here since the rally first joined the World Championship. We've obviously got a lot of work still to do, especially compared to him, but it was already getting better in the afternoon and it's just a question of building up the kilometres. We didn't make any real mistakes so I'm quite happy. Tomorrow we're going to try and carry on like this, but of course tomorrow is also a completely different type of day, so effectively we have to start learning all over again!"
Co-driver Kaj Lindstrom has plenty of experience in Germany but he did not finish his last Rallye Deutschland in 2003: a statistic that he is hoping to remedy on this occasion.
"We've got off to a good start, but it's not been an easy day," said the Finn in the right-hand seat. "The main thing is that we've made no mistakes and had a clean run through the stages. We've been making more progress with the pace notes and although the stages today were not straightforward, we worked very well together and I think we've got a solid base to move forwards from now. Our aim is to get some points here in Germany, and so far we're on course to do that. Let's just keep it going..."
Source: RedBull Rallye
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