Kaur Motorsport launches 2017 attack

It’s looking to be a great season ahead for the Estonian Rally Championship. Looking back at last year, we got the announcement of Georg Gross and Raigo Mõlder coming back together for a programme in 2017 with a 2016-spec Ford Fiesta WRC, which sounded so refreshing for every Estonian rally fan.

Gross/Mõlder took third at Rally Sarma 2017. Photo: Rando Aav

Now that we’re done with the winter season, which concluded with Rally Alūksne 2017 in January, we’re headed straight towards the loose stuff. The first proper introduction to the gravel season will be Harju Rally, which promises to be one very exciting rally!

We have one team, though, which has lots of tough work ahead – and that’s Kaur Motorsport. To be precise, they are building Proto cars, based on a Ford Fiesta, for both Egon Kaur and Priit Koik. But it’s not been an easy ride at all – slight delays have hampered progress and there are worries whether the team will be ready with the Proto cars for Harju Rally 2017.

Egon Kaur & Priit Koik will do their first 2017 rallies in these Fiesta Proto rally cars.

The full name of these cars will be ‘Ford Fiesta Proto’ and they’ll be visually looking like M-Sport’s Ford Fiesta R5 – but the difference comes in what’s under the hood. Since Kaur Motorsport has the parts of their previous Mitsubishi Lancer Evolutions, they will put them to good use in their custom built Protos. The suspension, however, will be very similar to the R5 / WRC-class cars. When comparing speeds, Egon said that these Prototype Fiestas could make out to be even faster than the R5 cars.

Also, as a separate announcement, Egon and Priit have announced a small co-driver switch: Egon will now be co-driven by Annika Arnek, whom with he last drove together in 2015 and Priit Koik will be co-driven by the fresh Estonian Rally Champion, Silver Simm!

The popular opinion nowadays is that R5 cars are more ‘budget-friendly’, but really, for quite a big margin of rally teams, they are still very expensive. To make something fast, but at the same time at a significantly smaller budget, Egon and his colleagues thought that they’d make something right in the middle – a Prototype rally car.

Kaur MS received their first body in early April. First rally should be in late May.

When will we first see these Prototype Fiestas in action? Hopefully by the end of May, at Harju Rally 2017. The team is working hard around the clock to ensure that the cars will be ready, but not everything is up to them.

There are also rumours of other teams also working on some Prototype rally cars for the Estonian Rally Championship – but who could they be? We’ll see, stay tuned!

Karli.