Finnish driver Lappi is hungry for more at Safari Rally

Finnish driver, Esapekka Lappi, is confident of an improved performance at this year's World Rally Championship (WRC) Safari Rally in Naivasha.

Lappi finished 12th overall and eighth in the Rally 1 category in last year's competition after his Hyundai i20 Hybrid Rally 1 suffered a host of prop shaft problems. 

But Lady Luck appears to be smiling on him this season since giving Hyundai their second consecutive victory of the season after his triumph at the WRC Rally Sweden on February 18 . His teammate, Belgian Thierry Neuville, won the Monte Carlo Rally on January 28. His victory in Sweden came six years, six months, and 19 days after his last WRC victory in 2017. Lappi says his victory in the Rally of Sweden will not impact on his approach at this month’s Safari Rally.

“At least I go there knowing what the roads are like and what I can expect,” he told WRC.com.

“I think we will be better prepared and the car should be more reliable. Last year was an incredible experience with amazing views and people. The competition was not so good for me, but everything else was and I’m looking forward to it.”

Coincidentally, the last driver to share an almost similar period of a prolonged drought of victories is Kenyan legend, the late Shekhar Mehta, who first won the 1973 Safari Rally in a Datsun 240Z car, navigated by Lofty Drews, one year after Hannu Mikkola had become the first foreign driver to win the Safari Rally in a Ford Escort RS1600 navigated by Swedish Gunnar Palm.

Mehta, who went on to become the most successful Safari Rally driver with five victories, took five years, 11 months, and 24 days to win his second Safari Rally title in 1979, driving a Datsun 160J co-driven by Mike Daughty.

The duo went on to retain their title for three consecutive years (1980-1982), an achievement yet to be matched by other drivers.

Mehta, like Lappi this season, was known for running part programmes in the world championship, but was undoubtedly one of the fastest and most talented drivers across the season’s rough terrain since he learnt how to spin cars through expansive family-owned sugar plantations in Uganda.

He sampled many cars throughout his career, but his breakthrough was realised in the Datsun/Nissan stable. He also drove Group B supercars – notably an Audi Quattro in Argentina in 1983 and a Peugeot 205 T16 in the 1986 Safari Rally. It is the same model that ended his career following a near-fatal accident in the 1987 Pharaoh Grand Raid Rally in Egypt.

Born in Uganda, but later acquiring Kenyan citizenship, Mehta remained hugely popular in his country of birth, kicking off a debate between the two countries on his ownership.

It took the intervention of the then Ugandan president Idd Amin Dada who ended the conversation with an empathetic terse statement: "As far as I am concerned, Mehta is a Ugandan."

He died in 2006 at a London hospital aged 61.