Esapekka Lappi Had a Rough Rally Finland

Esapekka Lappi splits time in a Toyota GR Yaris rally car with eight-time WRC champion Sebastian Ogier, so he needs to make the rallies he enters count. When he got the nod for this weekend's Rally Finland, he converted the opportunity into four stage wins and entered the event's final stages in third. This being Rally Finland, though, things quickly got weird.

Lappi dug into a rut and rolled three times. That is not all that unusual for a WRC event. Even his choice to finish the stage and lose less than 30 seconds, all while driving a car with a smashed windscreen, dented roof, and leaking radiator, is pretty par for the course for pro rallying. The strange thing is what happened between stages, with just one more event to go.

With the radiator still leaking and no spare fluids nearby, Lappi knew his best chance to finish the event would be to find water as quickly as possible. This being Rally Finland, the stage ended near a lake. The Toyota driver quickly put two and two together, running down to the nearby fresh water source to refill the bottle and top off his radiator while leaks were fixed.

The car ran the day's final stage without a windscreen, then lost the remaining bits of roof on the stage. Lappi and his co-driver finished the event in goggles, but they finished the last stage and held onto third anyway. A strong result for anyone, let alone someone in a car cooled by a nearby lake.

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