Although the violent impact didn't harm the two contestants heavily, navigator Guido D'Amore reported after a couple of days two cracked ribs and a broken one that require a temporary stop to his ERC. After the accident Umberto Scandola said:
"I'm very sorry for what happened this weekend, but I think it's part of the difficulties you might encounter when you face such a kind of races. Like in Poland even here in Latvia we had to face very different situations from what we are used to. Average stages reach a speed of 120 km/h with hard soil followed by sandy ground, and for us, new references to memorize. Since it's our first time here in Latvia we started unbalanced in comparison with those rivals accustomed to this route. In the first part we tried to keep a regular pace, we were a little distant from the top timings, but the delay was less than what we had in the first round in Poland. A few mistakes compromised the outcome of Day 1 with a 20-second penalty and a failure in the engine which costed further 15 seconds. Alltogether we lost 4-5 positions closing in P20. On Saturday we found a better racing ground and we were satisfied with the car set up. After a decent start in the morning, we took a curve badly losing control of the car. The rest is history"
After this tricky race we are now sailing towards a safer harbor (on paper): Rally di Roma Capitale that will be raced on July 23rd-25th. The focus now is on rebalancing the team after the injury of Guido d'Amore.
