RALLY, MONTECARLO ALTERNATING ROAD SURFACES THE REAL CHALLENGE FOR DRIVERS TO OVERCOME

To what degree will the special stages be damp and wet, and how many kilometres of snow-covered asphalt will there be? And how will that affect the balance of soft, supersoft and winter tyre selections?

The key to dominating the Monte Carlo Rally 2023, which features higher average temperatures and lower altitudes this year than in past editions, depends on the answers to those questions.

Simply put, the odds of victory will primarily come down to successfully managing the balance between different conditions, ranging from dry - amounting to at least 36 percent of the total 325.02 kilometers - to snow (potentially less than one percent of the total distance). What makes the choice even harder is that conditions vary stage by stage within the same loop - sometimes even within the same stage - throughout all four days of the rally.

Tyre management will especially come to the fore on Saturday, during which the inconsistency of the road surface conditions is compounded by asphalt and tracks that put the tyres to the test.

In the charts below is our analysis of what can be expected over the next four days, day by day, based on Tuesday's recce: