The end of the Christmas holidays coincided with the start of the season of the Xmotors team, and the Maser Association was preparing to enter the most famous stage of all, that of the FIA World Rally Championship, thanks to Federico Laurencich, who crowned the dream of it will be many drivers, namely to take part in the Monte-Carlo Rally.
While waiting for this prestigious participation, scheduled to take place from January 25th to 28th, the driver from Gorizia, always supported by the inseparable Alberto Mlakar, took part in the recent January Rally, a classic pre-season event that took place from January 5th to 7th. took place in January.
Driving a Group N Peugeot 106 Rally curated by LM Motorsport and registered for the colors of Gorizia Corse, the Treviso team's sole striker completed the first stage in the best possible way on Friday, taking provisional third place in his class.
The following day, Saturday, saw erratic performances that saw Laurencich fall off the category podium, but he managed to make up ground in the overall standings, showing that he was making a comeback from 47th place Starting the stage in 33rd place – ninth at the last time control, despite an unexpected digression.
On the last six special stages, the Gorizian native was back on the attack, managed two scratches in the class and, with a more than positive thirty-fifth final place, to which he added fourth place with a score of 7.3, he continued to climb the steps to an absolute conclusion to climb to seventh overall place in the Austrian Two-Wheel Rally Championship and eighth in the Austria Trophy.
“It's a shame that we went off the road in the last race on Saturday,” says Laurencich, “because it meant we lost about forty seconds and had the chance to open 2024 with a podium.” But that is That's okay too, because our presence was aimed at looking beyond the horizon and not at the individual result in the race. The aim was to take action for the next Monte Carlo.”
A refinement work focused primarily on the reconnaissance front, with Cristian Terpin and Lorenzo Lamanda doing very important work in the World Cup projection.
“I would like to especially thank Cristian and Lorenzo,” adds Laurencich, “because one of the key factors in managing Monte-Carlo in the best possible way is precisely the reconnaissance team.” We have no experience with this type of work and neither did you first time. We chose Austria precisely because the conditions we found, especially on the last day with ice and snow, were very similar to those in Monte-Carlo. Instead of talking about theory and testing, we tried to grow together in this area. It helped us a lot, we worked on finding the right feel between understanding what they saw with their eyes and what we needed in the notes to be able to use their information effectively. We are happy with how it turned out and now all we have to do is wait with emotion and fear for this dream to soon become a reality. Thanks to everyone who made it possible for us to be at the start of the rally of all rallies.”
