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SOUSA IN THE TOP TEN OF THE AZORES RALLY
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Pilot of the Red Bull Rally Team won the penultimate Special Race of the day

Regularity was the watchword for Bernardo Sousa and Jorge Carvalho during the first stage of the Azores Sata Rally. Driving carefully but without losing sight of their main opponents, they finished the 101.47 km of the day in seventh position overall, winning one of the “specials”.

Bernardo Sousa entered the first sections of the first stage of the Azores Sata Rally too carefully but ended up driving more aggressively, which even allowed him to win the penultimate section of the day against the clock. On a day that seemed as if it were going to end calmly, just one swerve off the track in the last section changed all plans and prevented the final result from being anything other than seventh place overall. Tomorrow, the objective is to get closer to the pilots up front and actually finish his third participation in the race for the first time.

“The day went quite well. “We entered the first sections too carefully but then we started to accelerate because we didn’t want to remain too far behind our opponents, and this worked”, analysed the young pilot, referring to the “special” won almost at the end of the stage. Unfortunately, in the following stage, things didn’t go well and Bernardo ended up by losing some time and not managing to maintain his sixth-position overall start to the section.

“We braked a bit too late and failed to take the bend. So the car went straight ahead and we ended up astride a ditch. We had to wait for the public to help us get out to be able to continue the race. This made us lose some time but not enough to give us a negative score in this first section”, points out the pilot, who finished in seventh position overall, at 2m14.6s from the leader. The Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX didn’t suffer any serious damage and, after replacing the bumper, it will be ready to race again.

Tomorrow, the racing strategy won’t be very different to today’s. “We want to keep increasing our pace carefully without taking any risks. This piece of bad luck at the end of the day makes it more difficult to reach the podium but we’re going to try and catch up with the leaders and watch out for any eventual mistakes made by our opponents.”
The second and last stage of the Azores Sata Rally will again have nine sections against the clock – in a total of 124.80km – which, according to Bernardo Sousa, will be “even narrower and more winding than today’s”.