“I can’t remember an event like this before.” That was Ott Tanak’s summary of a particularly challenging Rally Chile that ultimately ended a character-building eight-month barren run for the Estonian and M-Sport in the World Rally Championship.
It’s fair to say that Tanak has witnessed pretty much everything the WRC can throw at you over a 14-year career at rallying’s highest level. But Chile’s welcome return to the calendar after a three-year hiatus offered up a vastly different prospect than back in 2019, a rally also claimed by Tanak.
The South American country boasts stages that tick a lot of boxes for drivers, combining attributes of the fast-and-flowing roads you can find in Wales, New Zealand and Finland. But nobody anticipated quite how abrasive Rally Chile’s virtually all-new route would be, and that turned the event into a strategic affair where tyre management was paramount. “Normally every year you have events where you need to manage, but this one was management throughout the weekend,” reckoned Tanak. “It needed a very different approach.” It was Tanak and M-Sport that mastered this to firmly close the door on a run of heartbreak, misfortune, and reliability woes this year.
The event build-up was mainly centred around the fact that this was Toyota driver Kalle Rovanpera’s
