According to François Delecour, getting the tyre choice right on the International Jännerrallye poses a similar problem to choosing tyres for Rallye Monte-Carlo – and that is well known for being something of a lottery.
“The key thing is to think in terms of groups of stages, rather than individual stages,” he said. “So you choose the best compromise that will suit the whole loop, rather than just one stage. That might mean that you are not especially quick anywhere, but hopefully you come out at the end of the day with a result that is okay.”
Delecour chose the wide tyres for the morning loop of stages, running a combination of studded and non-studded tyres in order to gain some grip in a wide variety of conditions. “If you go for something extreme, it will either work very well or very badly,” he explained. “Look at Raimund Baumschlager: he took the narrow tyres, which were wrong for the first stage but worked very well for the second.”
Yet Baumschlager leads the rally after five stages while Delecour – who is being saddled by a broken gearlever – was down in eighth, underlining the trickiest aspect of tyre choice on the Jannerrallye: even playing it safe is sometimes a gamble