Proton crashes out of Hungarian Rally
Proton’s latest outing for the Intercontinental Rally Championship season has turned out to be a forgettable one as neither P-G Andersson nor Giandomenico Basso were able to bring their Satria Neo S2000 rally cars across the finish line of inaugural Canon Mecsek Rallye in Hungary.
Being a newly-included event in the IRC calendar, Proton’s had their hopes up for a strong finish as no team had any past experience to draw upon in preparing their strategies for the rally. Unfortunately, however, their plans did not include having Basso suffering from a freak failure of his engine oil filter seal in the first day or Andersson kerbing his wheel in the next.
Andersson finished the opening special stage in 17th position before his accident in the second special stage forced an unscheduled wheel change. The incident cost Andersson almost eight minutes’ worth of time, and dropped to 42nd place. To make things worse, it eventually turned out that Andersson’s car also sustained damage to its differential, resulting in adverse effects to its handling.
To his credit, Andersson was able to overcome his handling difficulties and moved himself to 39th place in Special Stage 5 before eventually forced out by technical issues in Special Stage 6.
Looking at the brighter side of things, Head of Proton Motorsports, Datuk Abdul Razak Dawood noted that, “Under these circumstances, we had certainly hoped for a better result, but despite the unfortunate setbacks, Andersson’s drive was able to clearly demonstrate the Satria Neo S2000’s strong pace and competitiveness. We have certainly taken a significant step forward compared to where we were earlier this year, and development of the car continues as we look forward to bridge the performance gap between us and the likes of Skoda, Peugeot and Ford.”
Pictures: Official Proton release.
