It's been six days from our WRC Croatia Rally 2023 finish

Hi, friends!

Yeah, it's been six day from Sunday when we finished our first World Rally Championship event and I must say that I am so proud because of that.

Whrn I think with distance about the special stages, they are extremly hard, as the WRC stages should be.

OK, some of them had been run in our national rally championship but we don't have the Rally1 cars and that amount of Rally2 cars on the entry lists.
These big cars with so much power and 18 inch wheels just destroy the roads and lots of cuts are deep more then half a metter.
After we hit the bottom of the car a few time in those cuts, we decided to rather slow down then to enter the cuts and destroy something.

There is another thing: it was raining a week before the rally so there was no chance that all the mud in forests should dry up.
Yeah, it was so much mud in the forests that after we finished special stages Kostanjevac - Petruš Vrh (twice), I felt lucky to be at the finish. That was like a dtive on black ice in April, horror.

I žust admit that I felt terrified after we stopped on the first day of the rally. Steering rod snapped after a few cuts and after the last one when we cut onto the curb, where other cut also, car just rotated and gently parked in the ditch. I was terrified.

After we went out from the car, I watched at it in the ditch and saw that wheels look in the different direction. That was it
Car went on the trailer to the service park and team needed only around 45 minutes to repair everything. We were ready to restart the rally following day with the time penalties.

There was no need to push 100% on Saturday and to risk another ditch so we started to push where we could and after we saw lots of mud and dirt on the road, we slowed down a little bit. That provedi to be the right tactic and made me happy.

Sunday was different because I decided to push at 100% again (again slower then on Friday, says my co-driver Damir P.). On the Power Stage I tried maybe 110% of myself. When we crossed the finish line of the last special stage , we started to hug with other competitors who ažso finished tbis hard tarmac rally but we had to drive 70km more to the ceremonial finish which was just close to the service park.

There was a big traffic jam around town of Kumrovec where was the Power Stage because Police says that 70.000 people came to watch it. We drove 10km for around 50 minutes and after that we hit the highway. After we crossed the ceremonial finish, all the cars went to parc ferme where they stay for around hour or two to see if there will be some additional technical scrutineering.

In the end we heard that everything passed good and our rally was successfully finished. I learned one big thing: you MUST have a professional team behind you if you want to do well on this level. Please don't forget that this is a World Rally Championship level.

It feels good to have something big like tthis under your belt. I am HAPPY!!! Do I have to say something like this after I cried while driving on Thursday after a ceremonial start?!

THANKS, HIVE!!! THANKS SO MUCH!!! ❤️❤️❤️

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