Pierre Campana finished this weekend’s Rally Città di Bassano as comfortable winner of the S2000 class. The Corsican rally star narrowly missed out on a podium finish overall as the WRC cars swept the top three positions. The rally was won by Poland’s Robert Kubica. 

Campana, driving alongside his long-term co-driver Sabrina de Castelli, was at the helm of a Peugeot 207 S2000 for the nine-stage rally, topped the S2000 classification and was just ten seconds shy of third place.

A total of 128 competitors were registered for this 29^th running of the Bassano rally with Campana aiming to use the event primarily as practice for next month’s San Remo rally, in which he will compete with the Michelin-shod Peugeot, sponsored by Perin.

The rally was run over a tight 24 hour schedule with the opening stage, the short 2.92km Marostica stage held on Friday evening and the remaining eight special stages held in mixed weather conditions on Saturday. The changeable conditions meant that tyre choice was important and played a key role in the outcome of the competitive event.

It was another typically solid performance for the Corsican sensation, though he had to fight back from a spin in Friday’s stage that left him down in tenth place. He then unfortunately made an incorrect tyre choice in the wet early morning conditions and lost a minute-and-a-half in the initial stages, with 40 seconds lost during the long Caveletto stage.

Pierre was able to show significant improvements from morning to afternoon runs on Saturday across the repeated 12.66km Valstagna, 24.72km Cavaletto and 7.49km Rubbio stages. In fact, Campana’s pace was extremely competitive in the event’s closing stages with top three times in the final three stages, including the two 12.94km Monte Grappa runs.

Pierre Campana said: “I’m reasonably pleased with how this Bassano rally as gone for Sabrina and I, even if I was frustrated with the incorrect tyre choice early on Saturday morning which lost us a lot of time. The main purpose of taking part in this event was to reacquaint ourselves with the Peugeot, Michelin tyres and of course to return to competitive rallying. It was good to be back and in the heat of competition. Overall, it was clear that the WRC cars were the ones to beat and so I was pleased to finish as the top S2000 car by quite a comfortable margin. We learned a lot about the performance of the car, the Michelin tyres and it was all really useful practice for our participation in San Remo in a few weeks from now. Bassano is a great event with a large number of competitors so to finish fourth, ten seconds from the WRC cars is quite good. I’m looking forward to San Remo and am thankful for the support we are receiving from Peugeot, Munaretto Sport and Perin.”