ERC Take Five with Erik Cais

After coming so close to the podium so many times, you finally finished in the top three on Barum Czech Rally Zlín. How does that feel?
“Definitely we can be proud about ourselves for how we managed the rally. Hopefully we made some people happy but it’s a bitter-sweet taste at the end for third place, it’s just… just… we don’t know what could have happened if there was no second Rajnochovice stage. But we have to be happy with third place. It’s also my first European champ ionship podium so there is a lot of happiness but not all the happiness.” 

With the all the changeable weather and challenging conditions, would you rate this as the hardest Barum Czech Rally Zlín you’ve done?
“I would say 2022 was probably the most difficult one but this was definitely not the easiest one.”  

How much of an impact did the 20-second time penalty have on your mental approach and motivation?
“To be honest zero. I absolutely don’t care about the penalty because when I see our times I knew even with the penalty we could fight for the victory. More I’m looking for a better tyre choice on stage number eight.”

To what extent was SS8 the pivotal stage? 
“We had the information from the airport it won’t rain there and after we came out of service they called to say it would rain there. It was 50/50 it could just rain slightly when we are starting and then it starts really, really raining a lot. But it was heavy rain for us at the start. For the first two kilometres I was driving under 50kph because I didn’t see nothing but when I saw the videos of the others they didn’t have it like that. Sometimes it’s better to start first [on the road], sometimes it’s worse. But I’m happy we made it through and showed our speed.”

Eight stage wins clearly shows you had the speed. How much satisfaction did that bring?
“You need to have a complete package to be fast here and we showed we had the complete package for Barum Rally. Now we will try to do our best to be in Poland [for Rally Silesia]. I know a bit from the testing we have done there so hopefully we can be fast again.”