- Jan Kopecký eleventh following Friday’s leg of Rally Wales

World Rally Championship in 2007 is being closed out traditionally by Rally Wales, which rightfully belongs among the most popular races of the Championship. At the starting line of today's rally, which has seventeen special stages in its schedule with a total distance of 365 kilometers, the Jan Kopecký-Filip Schovánek crew with their Škoda Fabia WRC car under the colors of Czech Rally Team Kopecký were present.

Since there still are many unknowns in the world championship rankings, plenty of excellent battles right on the special stages of the Wales Rally were expected. Attractiveness of the rally was to be supported by various loose tracks, where the drivers quite often find very rugged and technical parts especially throughout the forest sections, as well as very wide and fast parts of the especial stages. Although it was expected that the typical muddy surface can be made even tougher by frequent rain and visibility can be influenced by the infamous thick fogs, today's climatic conditions have surpassed even the boldest expectations of adverse weather. In certain laces an almost impenetrable fog was well complimented by low hanging cloud cover, from which intensive rain kept wetting the special stages.

In spite of the unusual weather Jan Kopecký handled the demanding Friday's leg well and for the start of the second leg he will be getting on his way from an eleventh place in the running order.

"Although we did expect the infamous island weather, today's very dense fogs and especially strong downpour at the end of the leg startled us. Climatic conditions, which we experienced on the special stage tracks, cannot even be described in words.

It is unbelievably hard to drive a car on a special stage if you cannot see a damn thing because of the fog and clouds. During the final special stage today have maybe lost some time passing Jari-Matti Latvala and Henning Solberg, but on the other hand we have moved higher up the rankings because some of our competitors obviously had even greater problems on the track.

The Škoda Fabia WRC car is running well and especially the driving qualities make me happy," said Jan Kopecký.

"The crews were met by literally dramatic conditions. Jan and Filip have overcome the weather obstacles very well. Unfortunately the world's top competitors are working very intensely on speeding up their cars and we are succeeding, within the current homologation, to at least compete on the basis of the driving qualities of the Škoda Fabia WRC car through continuous work on the chassis. We are unable to influence the engine torque and its performance in any way. It is these exact conditions where this fact is unfortunately being extremely negatively manifested," added the team manager Josef Kopecký.