Strong performance: Dominik Dinkel finishes sixth behind Sébastien Loeb

Dominik Dinkel, runner-up in the German Rally Championship, and his co-pilot Christina Fürst produced with a strong display in their fourth rally in France to capture sixth place overall, just 11.6 seconds behind the nine-times world rally champion Sébastien Loeb.

The Brose rally team applied the experience it had gained on gravel to date to perfect effect at the Rally du Haut-Var. It impressed with a strong performance with the Hyundai i20 R5 in the third race of the French Gravel Championship in the hinterland of the Côte d’Azur and finished as the fourth-best participant in an R5 car.

“Things could have gone even better, but a puncture on the rear left tire on the second trial and a broken brake disk on the third cost us valuable time. In addition, we had too soft a brake pedal with a lot of free play throughout the entire event, which meant that I had to keep on pumping before the braking point in order to generate pressure,” explained the 26-year-old Dinkel.

“There were loose stones on the track time and again, some even as large as a soccer ball,” was how his co-pilot Christina Fürst (32) described the tough conditions.

Despite the technical handicaps, the Brose team clocked times in the top ten in all ten trials, which covered a total of 114 kilometers over two days. It was even among the fastest five of the overall field on two occasions and among the top five in the R5 category all the time, even coming third on trials eight and ten.

The team’s next outing is the German race in the World Rally Championship (WRC) from August 23 to 25.