Breen and Nagle mix it with the best in the Arctic

Craig Breen and Paul Nagle finished fourth overall at the Arctic Rally in Finland in their Hyundai i20 WRC.

The Irish pairing of Craig Breen and Paul Nagle enjoyed a strong performance on WRC Arctic Rally Finland at the weekend.  They clinched fourth overall as well as claiming a useful haul of points of the power stage to secure a dominant result for the Hyundai Shell Mobis World Rally Team which took three of the top four places on the event.

Breen, who is sharing Hyundai’s third car with Spaniard Dani Sordo this season, was making his first outing of 2021 and initially lay as high as 2nd place until dropping back to 4th as he worked with his engineers to find the optimal settings for the Hyundai i20 WRC in the snowy conditions. 

With bonus points on offer for the power stage, the Irish pair pushed to the limit, just missing out on the stage win by 0.3 of a second. Their performance leaves them in 6th place in the Championship standings on 16 points.

Speaking after the event, Breen said: “It definitely gives me motivation. We spent some time in the regroup to analyse where I was losing time compared to the others. Thanks to the engineers, we were able to identify a few things. I knew the speed was there, so it was nice to score some points for the team in the Power Stage and to end the weekend on a positive note.”

The event was won by Breen’s Estonian teammate Ott Tänak. The next scheduled round of the 2021 World Rally Championship is another new event to the calendar, Rally Croatia, which will take place at the end of April.