Thus began the second round of the Lithuanian Rally Championship, which took place in the western part of the Kelmė region. The competition, which took place over two days, or rather one evening, one night and one day, offered the participants the classic special stages of this region with quite wide, wonderfully winding roads. After the first event in Mažeikiai, the persistent dryness raised a number of questions, the most important of which was whether the dust will again determine the positions in the overall standings and in the class standings. Under the microscope were the nighttime special stages, as the situation is worst at night. However, the gathering clouds and rain seemed to calm many, and everything went well in the first night test. But the rain did not arrive everywhere, nor did the wind, and so the sixth special stage of the rally, which was partly buried in dust, reshuffled the cards.
The first start number that adorned the red Škoda Fabia N5+ is usually not favorable, as you have to clear the road and with each car the grip is getting better and better. But that did not stop Martynas Samsonas from going fast enough to build a lead of nearly 17 seconds in the four evening stages on Friday. During the night, man from Utena ran even faster, and in the sixth stage, which the athletes officially finished already on Saturday, the dust that had been kicked up again mixed up the results considerably, and after the first day, the team of Martynas Samson and Ervinas Snitkas had built up a forty-second lead over Vladas Jurkevičius. Martynas, however, was anything but calm, because in one of the evening steages fate played an extremely dangerous game with the leaders of the championship, where only a few moments and centimeters were between life and death. In a wooded and extremely fast section, a large moose ran out of the bushes and Martynas’ car, traveling at 120 km/h+, narrowly escaped a collision. On the first day of the rally, unfortunately, things did not go much better for the other two LARČ1 Škoda Fabia N5+. Linas Vaškys did not make it to the special stages on Friday due to oil pressure problems, while Eugenijus Sladkevičius was disturbed by various small problems that robbed man from Elektrėnai of most of his attention. Of course, the dust of the last stage did not help either, so Eugenijus dropped from eighth to twelfth place after the first part of the rally.
LARČ5 or differently – group N5 and it’s six cars after the evening part of Friday divided into three separate races. Rokas Steponavičius with Dovydas Ketvirtis and Ford Fiesta N5 fought second by second with the crew of Nedas Radišauskas and Justas Vičiūnas, who drove a VW Polo N5. Before the night section, they were separated by less than five seconds. Tomas Šmagarys / Valdas Čiuplys and Hyundai i20 N5 fought for the third place in the class and took over this position from Paulius Beniušis with Kristupas Adinavičius and their “Citroen C3 N5” before the night section. They were separated by eight seconds and there was a gap of five and a half seconds between Aurimas Eižiūnas/Justas Barysas in the Ford Fiesta N5 and Vilmantas Padegims/Edvardas Gurevičius and their Renault Clio N5, who were fighting for fifth place. If the first night special stage, only extended the gaps slightly, the second stage brought much more serious changes. Only Aurimas Eidžiūnas and Vilmantas Padegimas swapped positions – the latter moved up to fifth place, although the driver-dictated gap to the corner disappeared much faster than Vilmantas had expected, and his car barely fitted into the right-hand turn when car lifted off the ground with two wheels. Most unlucky of all was Nedas Radišauskas, who tried to turn off the auxiliary headlights because the wall of dust at night threw all the light right back into the crew’s eyes. This maneuver turned off not only the lights, but also the entire electrical system of the car, resulting in a time loss of more than 20 seconds. Even more time was lost trying to get back to the previous rhythm, so after the Friday part of the rally, Rokas Steponavčius led the LARČ5 standings with a lead of 37 seconds over Nedas. The situation was taken advantage of by Tomas Šmagarys, who approached the VW Polo N5 crew in the fight, with a gap of ten seconds. Paulius Beniušis was 20 seconds away from Tomas.
As the unusually cold Saturday morning dawned, those numbers were presented – six more special stages and nearly 60 sporting kilometers. The late start of the rally was joined by Linas Vaškys and Laurynas Paškevičius, who had not started on Friday, and after getting Škoda Fabia N5+ fixed, started at saturday according to the “Rally2” rule. Saturday was organized in such a way that the participants passed two different special stages, returned to the service area, whereupon two more special stages were waiting, only this time they were driven twice. Nothing special happened at the front during these six stages. The crew of Martynas Samsonas and Ervinas Snitkas extended their lead by nine seconds in the first three stages, which was then melted away by the competition in the next three stages. In summary, 40 seconds separated them from team of Vladas Jurkevičius and Aisvydas Paliukėnas, who took second place. The sporting form of Martynas and Ervinas, which has continued since the beginning of the year, and the immense and careful work of the team on the car, which drives extremely fast and without whims, is what all other drivers and their teams need to emulate. On Saturday, the crew of Eugenijus Sladkevičius and Marius Kairys tried to redeem themselves, but the mood was not there and it was difficult to show competitive times. In the end, the flashing emergency lights of the red Škoda Fabia N5+ and the low noise of the engine indicated that the technical problems had returned. On the other hand, they managed to keep the second place in the LARČ1 ranking, although they fell quite low in the overall ranking. Linas Vaškys, who returned to the rally, showed very competitive times considering the circumstances. Starting at the very end of the main channel of the rally, Linas showed top10 results and finished fourth in a special stage. Conditions were made more difficult by the line left by narrower cars and the large ruts that had formed in some places.
In the LARČ5 classification, among the regular N5 cars, the same status quo remained throughout the second day of the rally. The only exception is Aurimas Eidžiūnas, who took over the fifth place from Vilmantas Padegimas at the beginning of the day. Two former BMW M3 colleagues – Rokas Steponavičius and Nedas Radišauskas – set very similar times, so distance remained the same. So Rokas and Nedas shared first and second place in the LARČ5 standings and took fifth and sixth place in the overall rally standings. Tomas Šmagarys with the Hyundai i20 showed the fourth time in the LARČ5 standings throughout the day, which allowed him to stay in the third place among the N5 cars and in the ninth place in the overall standings. Special stages statistics of Paulius Beniušis is much more interesting. The Citroen C3 N5 crew started Saturday by winning the first stage among the LARČ5 contenders and reducing the gap to Tomas Šmagarys to 15 seconds. Unfortunately, this sprint ended very quickly, but comparatively happily – in the second special stage of Saturday Paulius did not fit into one of the turns and flew off the road at high speed, to which he later successfully returned. Fortunately, there was a rather large ditch near Paulius’ landing spot, which would have ended the race with great losses if he had hit it. This mistake cost Tomas Šmagarys over twenty seconds and was decisive for the fight for third place. Later Paulius showed Top3 times in the LARČ5 standings and caught up a bit with Tomas, but after a mistake it was not enough. The Citroen C3 N5 crew remained in eleventh place overall. Aurimas Eidžiūnas, who had taken the fifth place from Vilmantas Padegimas in the first stage on Saturday, did not let him take it anymore and increased the gap to southener Renault Clio N5 to 21 seconds in the remaining stages. In the overall standings Aurimas remained sixteenth, and Vilmantas – seventeenth.
This was the Rally Žemaitija, which always offers roads that are really typical for this region. It is not nice that the dust was once again one of the main issue in the fight for positions, but this is already the peculiarity of the summer rallies. It is great that the iron calm of Martynas Samsonas and the hard work of the team allow him to drive extremely fast even when cleaning the road. It is also pleasing that although technical problems could not be avoided, they occurred much less frequently this time and, at least on Saturday, all the N5+ and N5 cars that started reached the finish line. It seems that the nuances and maintenance of the new technology are becoming more familiar and reliability problems will more or less disappear in the long run. Now there is less than a month left until the third event of the Lithuanian Rally Championship, which will be associated with the long-awaited return to southern Lithuania and its special stages. So we will meet in Lazdijai at the end of June 🙂
| Driver | Co-driver | Car | Team | Class | Time | Overall | Class. | |||
 | Martynas Samsonas | | Ervinas Snitkas |  | Škoda Fabia N5+ | Samsonas Motorsport | LARČ1 | 55:55.47 | 1 | 1 |
| Rokas Steponavičius | | Dovydas Ketvirtis |  | Ford Fiesta N5 | GSR Motorsport | LARČ5 | 58:59.23 | 5 | 1 |
| Nedas Radišauskas | | Justas Vičiūnas |  | VW Polo N5 | Samsonas Motorsport | LARČ5 | 59:37.14 | 6 | 2 |
| Tomas Šmagarys | | Valdas Čiuplys |  | Hyundai i20 N5 | AUTORALIS | LARČ5 | 1:00:17.61 | 9 | 3 |
| Paulius Beniušis | | Kristupas Adinavičius |  | Citroen C3 N5 | ST-SPORT | LARČ5 | 1:00:43.66 | 11 | 4 |
| Aurimas Eidžiūnas | | Justas Barysas | | Ford Fiesta N5 | 7Bet racing by RALLY4FUN | LARČ5 | 1:01:50.90 | 16 | 5 |
| Vilmantas Padegimas | | Edvardas Gurevičius |  | Renault Clio N5 | Samsonas Motorsport | LARČ5 | 1:02:11.97 | 17 | 6 |
| Eugenijus Sladkevičius | | Marius Kairys | | Škoda Fabia N5+ | Samsonas Motorsport | LARČ1 | 1:04:03.70 | 23 | 2 |
| Linas Vaškys | | Laurynas Paškevičius | | Škoda Fabia N5+ | ORLEN Lietuva-Mažeikių ASK | LARČ1 | Rally2 | – | – |
