Brazil WRT Friday summary

Unlucky start for Daniel Oliveira in Jordan
The Brazil WRT driver had to retire after gone through mechanical issues on the first day of competition

An already complicated Jordan Rally got even more troubled for Brazil WRT driver Daniel Olivera, after the Brazilian representative was forced to abandon the race once he had completed the first special stage of this fourth round of the World Rally Championship.

Daniel Oliveira, Carlos Magalhaes, MINI JOHN COOPER WORKS S2000

Photo by: xpb.cc

Far from being the best start for Oliveira and his Portuguese navigator Carlos Magalhaes, their MINI John Cooper Works S2000 suffered for engine overheating after recording the time on SS7, Suwayma (13.5km).

After the mechanical trouble was reported, Daniel pulled over to the side of the liaison section to be driven by the auxiliary car straight to the Service Park located on the Dead Sea shores, where the team started working to sort out the problem.

All in all, Daniel and Carlos will re-join the race tomorrow for the final leg under the Super Rally system. After missing more than 200 kilometres of test between day one and two, the plan is to make as much as they can out of the final day of action which will help Daniel to gain more experience in the competitive WRC.

There are still eight stages and 148,10 competitive kilometres to be tackled until the finish line.

Brazil WRT driver Daniel Oliveira:

"We were driving well and calmly to get used of the car. The idea was not to make mistakes on the SS7 and to check out the car cautiously since yesterday we couldn't take part in the Shakedown. However, in the liaison section the temperature alarm of the car set off and with Carlos decided to stop the car. We called the team and we were instructed to turn the engine off.

There was nothing else to do, so that incident dropped out us of the race quite early. Tomorrow we hope to keep on gaining experience and kilometres since we are re-joining the race under the Super Rally system".

Brazil WRT Team Manager Paul Handal:

"When you are developing a new car issues arise all the time. The English properly call it 'teething problems'. These situations will help Daniel to come to some conclusions so as to boost the Prodrive's work. Every day he might cope with different challenges that will lead us to be closer to the ideal that MINI and Prodrive are looking for".

-source: BWRT