2nd Overall at 44th Edition of Bosphorus Rally

 

We’ve finished the Bosphorus Rally in 2nd place overall! Bosphorus Rally is the fourth round of the Turkish Rally Championship as well as being the first gravel event of the season.

Bosphorus Rally is a part of the European Rally Trophy and 1.4 coefficient round of the Turkish Rally Championship. It can be considered as the most important event in Turkish motorsport season. The rally got underway on the 24th of July in Pendik square with six stages on Saturday and six additional stages on Sunday to round up the challenge. We wanted to start the rally well but about after halfway from the start of the first stage, incredibly slippery roads effected our confidence with the car resulting in a time which was ten seconds behind the leaders. In the second stage our anti-roll bar broke which resulted in massive sixth gear slides at the end of corners 🙂 Combined with this a puncture on the third stage didnt help our time and we found ourselves trailing the leader by thirty five seconds after three stages. We managed to solve some of our issues at the mid day service and kept the times within three-four seconds off the leaders on the remaining three stages of the afternoon to finish the day in third place overall.

We started the second day with a clear goal of catching second place runner Yagiz and we managed to set the fastest time on the first stage. This was an indication that things were starting to go well for us. On the way to the second stage, Yagiz had to retire with a mechanical problem which promoted us to the second spot where we kept our position until the end of the rally to score major points towards our championship standings. Our teammate Murat have won the event and we are now 1-2 on the championship standings.

I would like to thank our team manager Serdar Bostanci for this continued support, our technical crew for providing a solid car, and our support team for being at every stage end to help us secure the best results.

You can reach the photos of the weekend from the ‘Gallery’ section and the in-car footage from ‘Video’ section.