We have had a simply fantastic day. Unfortunately the first stage was cancelled due to accidents but the next few stages were beautiful although extremely tricky in places. Many of them were soft snow with 6 foot high snow bank next to them.

Lots of narrow stuff though so you had to be carefull. I really feel like I’m getting got the car under me as Martin brundle would say. It’s been 12 years since my last event and it feels great to be in the seat. Even though we are well off the pace I am getting more comfortable with the conditions so we intend to press on harder tomorrow although we are already pressing on pretty hard and often using the snow banks. We had to be careful though as some of the many of the snow banks contained rocks as big as the car or Armco which I guess is better than a cliff. Fortunately we hit nothing other than snow.

The conditions went from heavy snow to rain to total whiteout to as bad as Mt Ruapehu on a bad day. The notes helped but at 170K with no visual indication of where the road even was things got very scary. We are hoping that these whiteouts do not continue tomorrow. We parked it once in a snow bank today but only lost around 30 seconds. Our adventure is now set to continue tomorrow and now we have achieved our biggest objective of making least two days rallying on snow and ice it will be interesting to see what tomorrow will bring.

Team Manager Teemu Tahko is very impressed that we have kept the car straight and have progressively improved our speed over the two days of driving on the tricky snow and ice.

Stage times and other report can be seen at www.agr.co.nz or www.wrc.com