John Kennard has an interesting idea of what constitutes “pretty good fun”.
Flying up to 60 metres in the air at more than 170km/h in a car you have no control over is not something many would place in that category.
But when you are the co-pilot for Kiwi WRC star Hayden Paddon, proving himself to be one of the best rally drivers on the planet, there is not much you look forward to more.
“Here they just put the road over the top of the rock,” Kennard said about the many high-speeds jumps that make up Rally Finland starting on Thursday night (Friday NZ time).
“You get these massive jumps where it is literally like you are going up over top of a boulder that’s two stories high.
“It is pretty good fun really, it’s a real rollercoaster.”
If that describes his on-road experience in Finland, Kennard’s off-road time there could hardly be more different.
Christchurch-born but based in Blenheim since 2002, the 57-year-old feels very settled in the rally-mad Scandinavian nation given the role it has played in his life over the past three decades.
With a Finnish wife (Satu) and the WRC largely contested in that part of the world, Kennard spends more time in Finland than he does in New Zealand these days.
Rally Finland is also where his career as a co-driver began in 1985.
It was a purely unintentional start that came about after he tagged along with Canterbury driver Brent Rawstron for a trip to Europe.
“I was mucking around driving local and national stuff at home,” Kennard said.
“I hadn’t actually been out of New Zealand and Brent was going away so we tagged along with them to help look after the car. It was only that the co-driver that was there was getting sick on the rallies we were doing. He headed home so I drew the short straw.”
Fast-forward 31 years and Kennard is taking part for the ninth time in what many purists consider the sport’s best event.
High speed, jumps and the gravel surface means it “embodies everything rallying is about”, while average speeds of more than 120km/h prove why “it is called the Finnish Grand Prix, because it is just so fast.”
Kennard also compared the atmosphere in and around Jyvaskyla, the town where the event is based, to an All Blacks test weekend in a small New Zealand city.
If his assessment of Paddon’s mindset is a guide, though, don’t expect all that buzz to have any impact on their chances of a top result at the eighth round of 14 on the WRC calendar.
Kennard continues to marvel at his young pilot’s ability to bounce back from adversity and deal with intense pressure after they bounced back from crashing out of back-to-back events with a superb third place finish in Poland.
It is a result that reiterated to one of the championship’s elder statesmen not only what Paddon is capable of this weekend, but also in the seasons to come.
“Our expectations this weekend are at least the same [as Poland],” Kennard said.
“He was beating himself up after Sardinia, but he tends to turn that around into a positive. He wants to put it right and he works all the harder to find ways to do that.
“He is absolutely driven and passionate about being world number one”.
