Greensmith pleased with data gleaned from Quattro River Rally

Greensmith finished the event 22.8 seconds behind Toksport WRT team-mate Nikolay Gryazin, who went quickest on all but two of the closed-road tests in an identical Skoda Fabia RS Rally2 car.

Not even a 10 second penalty that was meted out to the Russian by organisers for a jump start infringement on the second test was enough to deny him top spot from Rally Mexico WRC2 winner Greensmith.

Portions of the Quattro River Rally’s competitive route took crews through areas of the Zagreb region that will be revisited by the FIA World Rally Championship in less than a fortnight’s time for round four of the competition.

For that reason, Greensmith and his stand-in co-driver Chris Patterson – who last sat together at Rally Spain in October 2021 when they were part of the M-Sport Ford squad and finished sixth overall – started the pure asphalt event.

“It has been a very useful few days, getting to learn the Skoda on Croatian roads,” reflected Greensmith.

“We used the event to test different set-ups and despite some of the options not being optimum for the conditions, but important data was gained nonetheless.

“Looking to Croatia, we’ve a better idea of what we need to work on and improve to make the next step in our level of performance.”

Northern Irishman Patterson was deputising for Greensmith’s regular team-mate Jona Andersson who was unavailable for the trip to the Baltic State. However, he will return to the navigator’s chair next time out.

“The weekend went smoothly. Other than some tricky tyre choices, we had no issues and the team did a great job,” said the experienced Patterson.

“The main goal for the weekend was for Gus to gain as much information about the car set-up and how it handles these roads, which will be vital for him and Jonas at Croatia Rally in a few weeks.”