Rally Isla De Lanzarote 2015 Canary Islands Rally Championship

Sal Wed Dec 02, 2015 9:58 pm

With the cancellation of the Albert and the missus wanting to go somewhere warm for her birthday for a few days last week it seemed like a perfect idea to head over to Lanzarote for the rally which I last attended ten years ago. Luckily my wife was in agreement!

This year the event was the last round of the Canary Islands Championship which has been tightly fought all year and there was a tie in the drivers title between Enrique Cruz and Miguel Fuster both in Porsche 911 GT3s from rival teams Auto Laca and Copi Sport which is run by the well known Fernando Capdevilla. Therefore Auto Laca really went to town and entered five cars including Mikko Hirvonen in a Mini WRC and Armindo Martin in a Ferrari 360.

The rally started on Friday night with a super special at the San Bartolome kart track which was really well attended but the comparisons with the NW Stages ends there as the rest of the event took place on the mountain and country roads of the island next day. Of course there were a lot of fans out but I was really impressed by the amount of course cars and stage security cars who left no one in any doubt as to where they should watch from. They even had the local Guardia copter in attendance.

We got 6 stages in without any stress due to way the event was run and had a very leisurely seafood lunch at Arrieta in between sat by the sea in the sun so could have got at least one more in. The stages are superb as well, Tabayesco to Los Valles is a bit like the Col De Turini in places and there are easy access routes to most of the best viewing points so can highly recommend this rally to anyone wanting to try a late winter sun break combined with watching rally cars. There was even a 50 minute highlights programme on Sunday night on the main tv channel.

For the record Yeray Lemes from Lanzarote and a former JWRC driver won in one of Auto Laca's Porsche GT3s but couldn't help his team mate Fuster win the drivers cup with that going to Cruz . Hirvonen was going well having lead after SS1 but went out with a broken front diff in the afternoon.

Top event just waiting for the Canary Islands calendar to be announced for 2016!

Still sorting thru my images so here's some footage of the rally in the meantime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLmi96QTHq0

http://www.motoradiario.com/videos/35CzG8bL-DI