Qatar’s Adel Abdulla fought a gripping battle with Russian driver Alexey Titov through the super special and first selective section of the Baja Russia Northern Forest Rally, before losing time on the second icy, snowy section on Saturday afternoon.
Abdulla and navigator Nasser Al-Kuwari are contesting the opening round of the 2018 FIA World Cup for Cross-Country Rallies in a bid to regain the FIA T2 title in their Toyota Land Cruiser VDJ 200.
After sliding off the road into a snow bank, they ended the day second in T2 behind Titov and ahead of Portugal’s Bruno Oliveira. Supported by the Qatar Motor and Motorcycle Federation (QMMF) and the Qatar Government, Abdulla now needs to recover time and collect as many points as possible over Sunday’s two remaining stages.
Today we had a very good first stage and only dropped 27 seconds to the leader. But, on the second one, after around 50km from the start, on one corner there was part of an armoured car and I tried to avoid it and we slipped off the road and got stuck on the front left in a wall of snow. We lost a lot of time because the other T2 competitors didn’t stop to help and we had to wait until one of the local drivers pulled us out. We lost time to the leader, but we are still second and still have two stages to go and will try as hard as possible.
Adel Abdulla
How it unfolded
The action began on Friday afternoon with a 17km Prologue, where Abdulla clocked 16min 39sec for second in T2, 50 seconds behind Titov’s Ford F-150 Raptor. Poland’s Tomasz Baranowski and Oliveira were third and fourth, with Russian Yuliya Migunova-Khegay fifth in a second Ford Raptor.
Titov added another 27 seconds on Saturday morning’s hard-fought first selective section and consolidated on the second, where Abdulla lost 29 minutes after leaving the track and dropped behind Oliveira in the opening kilometres. The Qatari recovered some time and kept second.
The rally ends on Sunday with two more selective sections on snowy trails and forest tracks in the Suojarvi and Sortavala districts of the Republic of Karelia, before the ceremonial finish in the village of Vyartsilya.