At the scene of his World RX debut
nine years earlier, demon starts propelled the Finn into the lead in each of
his heat races on the opening day in Sweden, and he looked poised for victory on both occasions until
misfortune intervened.
In the first of them, that came in
the form of a technical issue almost within sight of the chequered flag; in the
second, a nudge from Johan Kristoffersson going over the jump sent him into a
spectacular 360-degree spin that prompted an equally spectacular save.
Crowd-pleasing as that may have been,
it left Grönholm down
on row two of the grid for the semi-final, in which he narrowly lost out on third position to
Kevin Hansen in a duel of the early jokers – failing to reach the
final by the margin of barely two tenths-of-a-second.
Entering the next day, the CE Dealer
Team by Volvo Construction Equipment star was fired-up to bounce back, and
behind the wheel of his electric PWR RX1e, that was exactly what he did. A brace
of second-place finishes in the heats secured him the same spot in the intermediate
ranking, and he then comfortably saw off Saturday nemesis Hansen to win the
pair’s semi-final and book himself a front row grid berth for the final.
Another excellent launch seemed set
to power Grönholm past pole-sitter Kristoffersson into the lead, but he was ultimately obliged to
slot in just behind, and as his
Volkswagen rival pulled away, the 28-year-old Kauniainen native elected
to settle for the runner-up spoils.
He will duly head next to Nyirád in
Hungary (27-28 July) – where he and CE Dealer Team stablemate Klara Andersson recently
tested with the FIA RX2e Championship’s ZEROID X1 – sitting second in title
standings, 22 points adrift of Kristoffersson at the top of the table.
“Of course the Saturday was
disappointing, since
the speed was there to fight for the win and everything that happened was out
of my control,” Grönholm reflected. “On the Sunday, I had a feeling we wouldn’t
be able to match the ICE cars in the wet conditions and driving
in the rain on that track has never been my thing.
“There was no chance to fight for
the win so second place was the best we could hope for, and I’m happy with the
points. We are a little bit on the back foot in the championship now, but it’s
early days and we’ll try to close the gap step-by-step.”
“The start of the
season was really heading into the unknown with a new race format, new tyres,
the ‘Battle Of Technologies’ and totally different weather conditions between
the two days,” added Team Manager, Jussi Pinomäki. “We had decent performance overall
and we have some ideas on where we need to work for the coming rounds. We’ll
continue to push hard to improve further for Hungary.”
Greece
Poland
Portugal