Rally Finland 2010 will start with a street Super Special Stage in Jyvaskyla

rally-finland

Neste Oil Rally Finland will commemorate its 60th anniversary in 2010 with a brand new city-based Super Special stage in Jyvaskyla and a revised itinerary that ends on Saturday night, rather than the more usual Sunday.

The new Jyvaskyla street Super Special replaces the previous gravel test at the Killeri horse trotting complex and will play an important strategic role in the rally, with stage times determining the all-important start order for the first full day of the competition.

"Our jubilee concept is an event taking place over three days," explained event manager Tiina Lehmonen. "It starts off with a city centre special stage on the Thursday and the results from that will determine the running order on Friday."

"Friday and Saturday will comprise a little bit over 300km of stages with the finish on Saturday evening, immediately followed by festivities including a concert. The Super Special that we’ve had for the past several years is not in the schedule now."

Event promoter Jarmo Mahonen added that the long term agreement struck this year with WRC promoters ISC meant further developments were planned for the future.

"We’ll be breaking numerous positive news about our rally and we have a strong belief in the future of both the FIA World Rally Championship and of our own event," he said. "Our five-year agreement with the WRC promoter very much helped us to sign a Finnish TV-deal of similar length. MTV3 has gained TV-rights for the series for as long as our contract with ISC runs."

"Having pocketed these deals it’s now so much easier to talk to potential business partners, as all our commercial agreements had been scheduled to terminate at the end of this year. Last week we signed a new three-year deal with Neste Oil and that enables us to work towards the future. This is the kind of stability I have for years been calling for. All stakeholders are bound to benefit from it in the long term."

"Our big target is already set for 2011, when you’ll witness the most far reaching changes this rally has seen in 60 years, but we’ll get back to those at an appropriate moment, sometime in the autumn."

Rally Finland is the eighth round of the 2010 FIA World Rally Championship and runs from 29 to 31 July.

In 2008, WRC was covered by 188 countries via 228 broadcasters, with a total audience of over 633 million plus 12 million visitors to wrc.com. 2009 will see a total of 12 rallies staged across the world in Ireland, Norway, Cyprus, Portugal, Argentina, Italy, Greece, Poland, Finland, Australia, Spain and Great Britain. For more information please visit www.wrc.com.