Motorsport: Sébastien Carron hurries from victory to victory
The fourth and shortest round in the Rallye-SM also fell prey to Sébastien Carron in a Ford Fiesta R5. The overall winner in Ticino was the Italian Kevin Gilardoni, who lives in Misox, in a Hyundai WRC. Short and crisp, plus pouring rain at times: Anyone who wanted to gain an advantage at the 19th Rally Ronde del Ticino had to [...]
Short and crisp, plus pouring rain at times: Anyone who wanted to gain an advantage at the 19th Rally Ronde del Ticino had to be up to all the tricks - and Sébastien Carron truly is this year. The two special stages Valcolla (7.2 km) and Isone (6.9 km) each had to be driven three times, meaning that a more serious mistake would have had an effect on the classification with a total distance of only 42.3 km. Carron remained faultless at the wheel of the Ford Fiesta R5 and won for the fourth time in 2016 ahead of his brand colleague Ivan Ballinari.
The Ticino native would have loved to win his home race. At least "Balli" was just able to keep Grégoire Hotz (1.9 s behind) at bay in the Swiss classification. The multi-champion gave a remarkable guest performance with the Citroën DS3 R5 normally driven by Mike Coppens. A good performance was also given by Tiziano Riva, who otherwise drives a Reynard F3000 on the mountain. With a Peugeot 207, the garage owner from Lugano just made it into the top ten in the high-caliber field and clearly relegated Joël Rappaz/Katja Totschnig (Peugeot) and Ruedi Schmidlin/Erich Götte (Ford Fiesta) to places in the S2000 class.
New edition of the Rally Gotthard postponed to 2017
The overall victory was also claimed by an all-rounder. The 34-year-old Kevin Gilardoni, who has achieved many circuit successes in various race cars, brought a Hyundai i20 WRC to the start. With this works car, which had never been seen in action in Switzerland before, the Italian set the fastest time on all six stages, beating last year's winner Felice Re (Ford Focus WRC) by 24.9 seconds. Urs Hunziker, assisted by Janine Wyssen, got through without any problems in his Mini Cooper WRC and finished seventh overall. In the Junior Rally Championship, Aurélien Devanthéry (Peugeot 208 R2) also remains unbeaten.
Unfortunately, the new edition of the Rally Gotthard has to be postponed to 2017 due to approval difficulties on the part of the Ticino. The rally commission of ASS has reacted quickly and added the Rallye du Mont-Blanc (F) near the border to the calendar as the next SM run on the same date (2/3 September).
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Photos: Jürg Kaufmann
