It definitely wasn’t the call Kalle Rovanperä was expecting. When his phone flashed ‘Kaj Lindström’ he put the spanners down and took the call. Hours later he took the private jet to Poland.
The two-time world champion literally dropped everything to come off the bench and deputize for Sébastien Ogier, who was ruled out of Rally Poland following a Tuesday morning road accident.
In Rovanperä’s words, this is how his Tuesday took an unexpected turn.
“It was a strange day, yesterday,” he said. “Of course, first of all, it was good to hear that Séb [Ogier] and Vincent [Landais, co-driver] are fine. That’s the main thing.
“But yeah, then I got the call from Kaj [Lindström, Toyota sporting director]… I was just changing some sparkplugs on my jet ski and about to be going on the lake. Then he called. I knew what it was about and the team made the call for us to come here.
“Of course me and Jonne [Halttunen, co-driver] were not prepared at all, so it was not an easy decision to come here – but, of course, we want to help the team as much as we can. The points are crucial this year, so yeah, we came to help.”
With no preparation and a compromised recce, Rovanperä knows he’s going to be up against it on his first ever trip to Poland.
“It’s quite a big challenge,” he added. “We basically need to do the whole rally almost in one day. And of course, not watching videos or anything before. It will be quite a tough evening and tomorrow. Trying to learn something, what we can. Definitely it will not be easy with this schedule.
“It’s really difficult to say what’s going to be possible with no test in the car for this rally. We need to see in the shakedown if we are in a correct way, let’s say. It depends how good we can do the recce and stuff.
“Of course, normally in a rally like this I would want to fight for the win. Maybe this weekend it’s not really so easy to do, but of course we will try to do our best to bring some good points for the team.”