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In Yalta, 2 June, 2011 – The programme of Day 1 of the Ukraine Rally included two stages in the streets of Yalta, 7.61 kilometres in total. Thierry Neuville in a Peugeot coped best with the technically challenging track and leads the field, the best of those driving Fabia S2000s was Sweden's Patrik Sandell who came third, followed by Andreas Mikkelsen of ŠKODA UK Motorsport.

Jan Kopecký of ŠKODA Motorsport (factory team) is seventh, 5.5 seconds behind the leader, Juho Hänninen got a 10-second penalty for starting off too early in Stage 2 and is 11th (- 11.7 seconds). There was a series of heavy rainstorms in the Crimea during the night before Thursday, Day 1 of the event, and the threat of more rain was hanging above the ground all day today.

Commenting on today, Jan Kopecký says: "The probability of more rain was rather high, and so we started off with a fairly soft set-up, which slowed us down a little, but we still have many kilometres ahead of us and nothing is decided yet".

Juho Hänninen had kind of mixed feelings about his penalisation: "We started well today, and we only learned about the penalisation after arriving in our service area – we will certainly look at what we did wrong and where. The loss is unpleasant, but we are not panicking."

The Yalta Rally continues tomorrow – the Day 2 agenda includes six stages (137 kilometres in total).

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