After the yesterday's "enormous" cold, today was like being in heaven. Still windy, but sunnily and almost comfortably warm. All preparation events took place during the day: recconnaisance, administrative checks and scrutineering, as well as the official press-conference held by the Organisers...

52 entrants started making notes for the rally, but only was 51 crew allowed to start after the scrutineering and the stewards meeting had been held.  Start number 41 (Fedorov/Katunin from Yaroslavl') won't be able to start due to inconformity of the roll cage on their car with technical regulations. Start interval for the first loop of stages will be set as 1 minute for all the crews, because there're no priority drivers on the start list and hence there's no need to apply a 2-min interval. However, after the first regrouping (following the first section) the top-5 will tackle the second loop of stages separated by 2 minutes at the start line. 

The official start ceremony will be held only after first two special stages and a very long (more than 2 hours) service. Such a duration is connected not only with some indulgences in this year's general regulations for the Cup rounds, but also with the fact that marshalls and safety staff will have to change their location in time between the stages of different sections.

The itinerary is quite favourable and the stages are accessible, so it will be possible for spectators to watch cars in most interesting places of the route. However they should take into account that in order to find better places on the 2nd and 3rd sections, they will have to come closer to the finish lines of special stages, which is not very easy to do...

So, to do list for tomorrow:
SS1 - 9:03
SS2 - 9:33
Service (first crew in) - 9:58
Regrouping.
Start ceremony - 12:45
SS3 - 12:58
SS4 - 13:51
SS5 - 14:19
Service 20 minutes (first crew in) - 14:54
Renorming (out) - 15:30
SS6 - 15:45
SS7 - 16:38
SS8 - 17:06
Service (35 minutes) - 17:41
Official finish - 18:06

All that will be followed by the final stewards meeting at 19:00, publishing the official results at 20:00 and the prize-giving ceremony at 21:00... Who will be awarded?... Let's wait for tomorrow evening!

News for translation received from Alexander Lesnikov
... today was mild like in heaven. Hopefully tomorrow it won't be awfully hot like in hell...

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