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Zlín, 27 August, 2011 – Although this year's Barum Czech Rally Zlín has been hit by extremely high temperatures of over 30º, the track is crowded with fans many of whom started looking for the best viewpoints in the early morning hours. Jan Kopecký of ŠKODA Motorsport (factory team) tops the rankings after Day 1 (9 stages), followed by his teammate Juho Hänninen and Freddy Loix of BFO ŠKODA, both of them 20 second behind Kopecký. Fourteen Fabia Super 2000s in total appeared on the start line, a record number of ŠKODA vehicles in the history of the IRC Championship.

The rally started with Friday's super special stage in the streets of Zlín. Watched by about 40 thousand people gathered along the track, the drivers' had to cope with an eight-kilometre city circuit. The fastest of them was Juho Hänninen, followed by Andreas Mikkelsen (- 0.5 sec) and Jan Kopecký (- 0.6 sec), all of them in Fabia Super 2000s.

Saturday's programme included eight stages (133 kilometres). The weather forecast promised a sunny day, with a fairly low probability of rain in the late afternoon. The midday service was therefore rather hectic in terms of choosing the right tyres for the rest of Saturday, because everybody knew that a heavy rainfall would change the conditions dramatically. All the teams chose hard tyres, which proved to be the right solution, as it did not rain at all in the end. After making a fairly slow start in the morning, Juho Hänninen was a lot faster in the second half of the day to move up from sixth place after Stage 2 to the runner-up position after Day 1, but so was also Freddy Loix who has achieved exactly the same time and is sharing second place with Hänninen before the final day. Andreas Mikkelsen put in an excellent performance and was just behind leader Kopecký until Stage 7 when he had a tyre defect, a bad luck as a consequence of which he has fallen from second to sixth place.

Jan Kopecký: "The car is working perfectly, and we have made no mistake so far. There are many fans along the track, and they have indeed created a great atmosphere that is driving us forward. It's fantastic to be in the lead, but the other guys won't give us anything for free – we still have a hard fight ahead of us. One way or the other, we definitely want to make up for our last year's failure here".

Juho Hänninen: "We've had a good day overall, and the car is set perfectly. We had a fairly slow start and then a defect during the second run in Troják, but otherwise it's all ok!"

The Barum Rally ends on Sunday, with six stages in total (115 kilometres). The winner will be known after 2 PM.

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