Christian Merli forced to withdraw at Rally delle Marche

After Monte Carlo at the beginning of the season and his European hill climb championship win Christian Merli returns behind the wheel of the Skoda Fabia R5. In Cingoli near Macerata in the central Italian Marche region, he races for the first time at the 16th Rally delle Marche, the fifth round of the Italian offroad rally championship, with Massimo Furlino as his co-driver. Leaving the road at Cupramontana, in the seventh timed session of the day, he is forced to withdraw.

Christian’s comments
“It’s a shame. The first round on the four special stages went very well. We left teams behind us who race offroad all year round and we were sixth overall. Then we had the opportunity to change to harder tyres, but we decided to stay with the soft ones. We still improved our times, it was going fast, but in a right-hand corner just 150 metres from the finish line I got out of the ruts left by the cars before me, and I crashed. The Rally delle Marche is over for us. We’ll do better very soon at the next opportunity.”

The Rally delle Marche
The track was a total of 268.940 km long, of which 62.580 km made up the twelve special stages; there were four different ones with three rounds on each of them.

Translation by Ruth Scheithauer