Last Sunday, 27 April, the IB Translations team took part in the first classic rally race this season and finished 20th out of 41 participants in its category. Our crew included Mikhail Tsyferov (driver and investor), Konstantin Golota (observer and IB Translations founder) and Alexander Usoltsev (senior Twitter commentator).  

The video coverage is available at http://www.gazeta.ru/auto/video/retro_avtomobili_na_ulitsah_moskvy.shtml
Vehicle overview: http://usolt.livejournal.com/745044.html

This year, the race welcomed 49 crews, including four competing in a separate programme in the Veterans category (for cars made before 1946). Of the remaining 45 cars, four competed in the Young Timers category (for cars produced after 1969), and one raced out of competition. IB Translations ranked 20th among the 41 vehicles competing in the most populous category. It’s a true success! It was the first time we've made it to the end of the route, and this has been officially confirmed.

Mikhail Tsyferov, driver: 
The season opening was a blast. Big kudos to my teammates for their excellent work. Being locked up together in a small car for six hours with a lot strain and pressure on everyone is a real challenge for any team. But the success of the IB translation team always comes first, so we must all work hard towards the common cause.

Unfortunately, this weekend we could not avoid some pitfalls. Without the penalty that forced us to drive extra 30 km, the result could have been better. Now we need to analyse our mistakes and prepare ourselves better for the next stage.
During the race, the car was lacking speed in the straights and the AC power, but our engineers are on it. In the meantime, we can stick to steeper slopes and keep windows open. 

Arriving at a consensus on certain matters was no easy task (“Shouldn’t they have indicated traffic lights here?!” or “Will we overturn?”), but we have to learn to find answers quicker to boost our competitiveness.
Special thanks goes to our fans. Their support helped us a lot at the start. Hopefully, next time they will also be there for us at the finish. 
In any case, it’s great that we started the season on par with the top teams. The most important achievement of Sunday was to see our strength, and this motivates us to keep fighting.

Konstantin Golota, co-driver: 
As we promised the fans at the end of last season, this year we decided to prepare properly and put up a decent fight against our rivals. We trained hard and prepared our ZAZ for the rallies, and it paid back as we managed to make it to the end of the route for the first time. Thought we were the last to cross the finishing line and have a long way to go, we believe it's important to remember that to finish first you must first finish. The car demonstrated excellent reliability, beating even our famous rivals from the DeLorean camp. We enjoyed the great performance of all gears, each cylinder of the engine and even the brakes. We successfully solved all the riddles of the road book. We are the best, but are also modest and humble, so next time we will aim somewhere in the lowest double digits or even higher.
 
Alexander Usoltsev, Twitter commentator:
The emotional power of your first-ever rally would match only that of Natasha Rostova's first society ball. You are all at full steam, rushing and making silly blunders, realising your are running the same part of the route in the unforgiving Moscow traffic. Such rallies are certainly about the process, not the outcome, so you focus on the distance to cover. It was a really tricky route that the organisers had chosen this year but we successfully navigated it making it to the finishing line – for the first time in our vehicle's rallying history. We look forward to future events and beating all those smug Jaguars and Cadillacs on the track.

For live tweets from @usolt visit @golota82 (http://twitter.com/golota82). 


We have kicked off the 2014 racing season with the best result in the team's history and will do our best to prove that getting into the Top 20 was not an accident.

The next big event – L.U.C. Chopard Classic Weekend Rally – is coming up on 1 June. It is the highlight of the classic car season just like the Monaco Grand Prix in the global racing calendar (http://www.mercury.ru/luc/). We are looking forward to seeing our fans there.