Three N5 crews from Lithuania took a 1,500-kilometer trip north of Finland, where the famous Rovaniemi town sits between countless frozen forests and lakes. It will be a 2023 season opener for Martynas Samsonas, Linas Vaškys, and Vilmantas Padegimas. All drivers have the same, but a few different goals to achieve. There will be one native crew – Tommi Jylha with Toyota Yaris N5.
Martynas Samsonas will take his son’s VW Polo N5 for a test because Kajus Samsonas is taking exams this week:
Arctic Rally should be seen as a good life adventure because it is difficult just to finish it. Achieving results is still unrealistic for us. We are going here for the third time, and the first two times I really didn’t even understand what was going on there. A difficult rally in every sense. 250 different kilometers and the conditions are difficult with the unusual landscape. Of course, we also want to show the new N5 machines. I would like to finish Arctic Lapland Rally without circuses, without making the audience laugh, and return a healthy car to my son Kajus.
For Linas Vaškys it will be a second rally in his newly built Škoda Fabia N5:
We want to drive a lot this year. We had a normal winter only maybe in 2017-2019, where we drove on snow last time. We really wanted to try the Arctic Lapland Rally a long time ago, but we didn’t have a suitable car for that.
Martynas Samsonas helped a lot with the organization and everything else as much as possible, so we couldn’t miss such an opportunity to visit Rovaniemi this year.
The goal is to refresh the crew’s skills and get milage with this car. We don’t really think about the result, let’s just collect kilometers. It’s a good rally, perfect team and a lot of fun.
And Vilmantas Padegimas will try his Renault Clio N5 for the first time on a competitive occasion. It will be the third time for Martynas at Rovaniemi and for Linas and Vilmantas – it will debut in Finland.
Arctic Lapland Rally is a tough endurance-type event with 245 kilometers of special stages and nearly 600 kilometers of road sections in two days. Most of the stages are 20 – 33 kilometers long and more than half are driven in pure darkness. The complexity of the stages makes this event even harder, because of huge snowbanks, and very complex and varying landscapes, from very fast, to very technic and narrow parts of the road. Not to mention sub-zero temperatures.
The rally is unique in more ways. The Reece starts on Monday and there is no fixed number of passages. Usually, in Reece stage could be driven two times before the rally, but here in Lapland, you can do as much as you like. So it is common for competitors to sit in a Reece car for 4 days, from early morning to late evening, because stages and road sections between the are very long. Sunlight is also very limited. There is more. In a rally car, it is mandatory to have a snow shovel, pair of warm clothes, and other winter attributes, because a rally takes place in a very distant and Inhabitat area, so in case of an accident – crews have to survive in cold for an extended period of time.
So the rally will begin on Friday afternoon at 33.38 km opening Jyrhämäjärvi. After that – 5 more stages and 105 kilometers in total. Saturday will start with the early morning and Arctic Lapland Rally legendary stage – Siikakämä. Saturday will consist total of 140 kilometers of special stages and finishes in the evening. Temperatures during rally itself probably will quite unusual – around zero degree celsius.
There will keep you informed about progress during the rally 🙂
Full entry list and more information:
Photo – Martynas Samsonas, Jari Nurminen, Janni Pievilainen,