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World
Rally Championship runner-up Mikko Hirvonen doubts that Kimi
Raikkonen would be an immediate success if he switched to the WRC
next year.
Raikkonen
is planning to take a sabbatical from Formula 1 for at least one
season following the end of his negotiations with McLaren over a
2010 seat. The Finn has long been interested in rallying and has
hinted it would be his next step after F1. He contested this
year's Rally Finland in a Super 2000 car and set an impressive
pace before crashing. But Raikkonen's compatriot Hirvonen thinks
the regular WRC drivers' years of practice on the stages and with
driving to pace notes gives them a huge advantage.
"Kimi
is fast and with driving he doesn't have problems," Hirvonen
told Finnish website Sportti.com. "But preparing to
drive with pace notes is a difficult case for him. We WRC drivers
have so much more experience, and almost all the rallies will be
unknown to Kimi in advance. It's difficult to imagine that Kimi
could succeed, at least in his first season."
Hirvonen's
manager Timo Jouhki, who also brought Juha Kankkunen, Tommi
Makinen, Toni Gardemeister and Jari-Matti Latvala to rallying's
top level, agreed that Raikkonen would need time to get up to
speed. "Kimi is a really talented driver. No other F1 driver
has been driving a rally at that level," said Jouhki. "Rallying,
however, requires so much experience that I basically cannot see
him having any chance in the first year. Rallying is such a
difficult sport and experience counts."
Despite
suspecting he might struggle initially, Hirvonen reckons the
chances of Raikkonen appearing in next season's WRC are high.
"That man does not surprise me in anything," said
Hirvonen. "I would not be surprised if Kimi took a year off,
and did for example five World Championship rallies, or pushed for
the whole season."
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