Frustrating weekend for Veiby

The 22-year-old Norwegian and his co-driver Stig Rune Skjærmoen impressed big time by being third quickest overall on the opening stage on Thursday evening – with most of the powerful WRC cars behind.

“That was fun! The WRC cars have about 100 more horsepower and that makes it a bit special to be faster than most of them. At the same time, the cars don’t live up to their full potential on such short stages, but still” he said with a smile.

But the German WRC round didn’t turn out to be a success from start to finish for the Skoda driver and he goes home with more questions than answers.

“Long story short, SS1 was good – and that was it. It’s been a frustrating weekend where we’ve tried everything and I feel like I’ve driven well. We’ve done what we can, but haven’t been anywhere close to setting top times” said Ole, who doesn’t have an explanation to why they couldn’t keep up the pace.

“We’ve taken big steps forward on tarmac this year and we’re usually fighting for the best times. This weekend, we’ve struggled with an understeer car. We’ve changed the setup several times but it hasn’t fully worked out. Before starting the final stages, we changed diffs and then it turned out really bad. We spun three or four times in hairpins due to it” he explained.

Ole and Stig Rune completed the rally and gained lots of experience, something that is very important for the future.

“Although it didn’t work out the way we hoped it would, it’s been far from a failure. We just need to analyze and learn from this” he pointed out.

Ole didn’t compete for championship points in Germany and from that perspective, this rally was all about experience. He was still about three minutes behind Jan Kopecky, who was quickest in the WRC2.