Saturday 11 February 2006 1930hrs

Post-Event Press Conference

Henning Solberg (HS)
Mads Østberg (MØ)
Anders Grøndal (AG)

Good evening everybody, and welcome to this post event press conference at Rally Norway. A special welcome to the three drivers on the podium, Mads Østberg, Henning Solberg and Anders Grøndal. Congratulations on your excellent results this weekend. We will do this press conference half in English and half in Norwegian and first of all I would like to ask you Henning to give us a little summary in English about what’s happened to you these two days.

HS: For me, I have had an excellent weekend. No major problems at all it was just, go very fast the last day. Daniel beat me on SS2 and I have to really push myself to the limit on the next stage, and I was leading with 30 seconds on stage number 3 and then I could push even harder the rest of the stages, so yeah, it was a good day. Today I had good speed, I didn’t take any chances, I just have a good feeling with the car, a good feeling with the tyres and my co-driver was excellent, so everything was working well.

Was it surprising that Daniel was so far behind?

HS: Maybe a bit surprising, I was. But after Sunday last weekend I was so close to him and then he was in a battle with Gigi and I saw the tyres, I was right behind him maybe one second and for me I loved driving and I knew that car was good on Sunday so I just pushed on this rally with the car exactly as it was.

Thank you, so far. Overview, Mads. Give us a little summary of the rally from your point of view.

MØ: Well I think to start with we had problems on the first day catching the car in front of us but after that things… on the day we set some good times and caught up so after Day 1 I was third and day 2, we had a good run today so we had no problems with the car, it’s just ss 3 on the first day we had overheating on the engine. But except for that everything has been ok.

OK, and Anders Grøndal. Third in Rally Norway.

AG: Yes, our rally was very good. We had a big incident in Sweden last weekend when we had a very big roll. So, the mechanics did a good job to put the car back together this week, working 24 hours a day. We didn’t get the pace at the beginning of the rally, we were struggling a bit so, but we still we had a pretty good result. Today we got a better feeling than Friday, we set some very good times and

After what happened in Sweden, were you a little bit worried at the start of the week?

AG: Yes, the car was excellent but I didn’t give 100% my best, I was a little bit nervous. I braked many times shorter and and didn’t open the throttle 100% until the exit of the corner and that wasn’t optimal, but it was much better today. So it’s just to try and get it better next time.

Any questions in English before we go over to questions in Norwegian?

No shovels used then Henning?

HS: No shovels. I have the biggest shovels. I use the whole car if I have to.

More questions in English, please? Okay then we go to Norwegian.

Published: 2006-02-11 23:00