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 Swedish Rally 1997The official
Swedish Rally site. From the mountains of Southern France the WRC convoy travelled way up to Sweden for the only snow rally of the season, the Swedish Rally. This year, however, there was a serious lack of snow. With temperatures above the freezing point, most of the rally was run on icy and wet gravel roads, resembling in nature the roads of the 1000 Lakes Rally. Even though the roads were slippery and long studs were needed on the tires, there were no snow banks on which the drivers could 'lean' to achieve greater speeds on fast corners, an art perfected by Swedish and Finnish rally drivers. Swede Kenneth Eriksson started his season on home ground, as he drives all the gravel rallies for Subaru, while the asphalt races are driven by Piero Liatti, the winner of the opening round in Monte Carlo. Otherwise the works drivers were same than in Monte. Toyota Sweden provided Celicas for the tough Swedish driver Thomas Raadstrom and Finn Marcus Gronholm. The rally started on Friday with a short Super Special on the ice of a lake at the city of Karlstad. Tommi Makinen and Thomas Raadstrom were fastest, closely followed by others. On Saturday the rally continued in the forests north of Karlstad. The story of the day was tire problems. Almost everyone experienced loss of grip, as the the studs were ripped out of the tires on stage sections not covered by ice. The conditions were the same for everyone and with different tire selections the leader changed almost stage after stage. Eriksson, McRae, Makinen and Sainz stayed within 30 secs from each other until stage 8 where Makinen lost more than half a minute due to losing all the studs on the very long stage. But that was not enough: after all the stages of the day in the service the Mitsubishi crew tried to routinely change the gearbox, but something went wrong. Makinen was late from the last time control and got a penalty of one minute and 20 seconds. At the end of the day Kenneth Eriksson had taken the lead with Colin McRae only 7 secs behind. Following the Subarus were Sainz (30secs behind the leader), Raadstrom (47secs) and Makinen (1:47). Snow was forecasted for Sunday but all rallyists got from the sky was pure water. It seemed, though, that most of the tire problems were yesterday's news and it was up to the drivers how the battle would evolve. On stage 12 Colin McRae took the lead, showing again the kind of speed he had in his championship year 1995. Others were not far behind, and on SS 17 Ford's Carlos Sainz was 18 secs faster than McRae and took the lead. In the evening he was 12 secs in front of McRae and 27 secs ahead of Eriksson. The fastest man on the wet and sleet-covered roads was, however, Tommi Makinen, who at the end of the day had closed the gap to only 54 secs, being almost a minute faster than anybody else during the day! The first stages of the last day saw an extremely hard battle for the win. First McRae took back the lead from Sainz, but Eriksson was creeping closer all the time, passing both with a magnificient drive on SS 21. On the next stage the suspense seemed to be too much for Colin McRae who spun twice, assisted by a wrong tire choice. Colin dropped to fourth position behind Tommi Makinen, who was now only 21 seconds from second place, with two stages to go. On SS 23 it was Makinen's turn to do a high speed 360 degree spin but he was still 3 secs faster than Sainz. McRae was now keen to take at least the 3rd spot; he was only 4 secs behind Makinen. Both McRae and Makinen hoped for just a couple more stages to rewrite the ending of the thriller, but the end came too soon and the positions remained. Kenneth Eriksson took his 5th Swedish Rally win with a margin of 16 secs. Carlos Sainz knows how to stay cool under pressure and took the second position, with the fastest man of the rally, Tommi Makinen, 10 secs behind. 5 secs behind him was Colin McRae, not very happy of losing the lead he had earlier. Behind these four, there was a gap and then after a solid drive Thomas Raadstrom and Ford's Armin Schwarz, who really never could match the speed of the other works-drivers. The hectic pace of the WRC continues, and after a couple of rest days the crews head to Kenya in preparation for the Safari Rally, where we are not likely to see such a battle for seconds the Swedish Rally offered this year! Results of the 1997 Swedish Rally:
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