Championships, Victories and Podium Finishes for Yokohama in 2011 Rally Season

Yokohama team drivers dominated the 2011 North American rally calendar, piling up championships, event victories and podium finishes in a season that will be remembered as one of the most competitive in recent history. 

When it was over, Yokohama-teammates Antoine L’Estage and Patrick Richard claimed eight wins, 14 podium finishes, the Canadian Rally Championship and the North American Rally Cup.   While they together carried the Yokohama banner, the 2011 Canadian Rally Championship was a titanic battle between the Mitsubishi of L’Estage (St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec) with co-driver Nathalie Richard (Halifax), and the Subaru Rally Team Canada entry of Patrick Richard of Squamish, B.C. and co-drivers Leanne Junnila of Calgary and Alan Ockwell of Toronto.   The rivalry ended before the season did, as both teams were sidelined by mechanical problems at the final event of the Canadian series, the Rally of the Tall Pines. 

L’Estage wrapped up the Canadian championship after five of the six events, winning four rallies and posting one second place finish to top the standings. It was the second consecutive Canadian championship for the L’Estage/Richard team. The Patrick Richard Subaru notched one victory and a pair of second-place finishes on the season. 

L’Estage and Nathalie Richard also claimed the North American Rally Cup for the second year in a row, with two victories and three second place finishes in the Rally America series. Patrick Richard scored a third place in one of the two Rally America events he ran in 2011. The North American Rally Cup counts scores from both the Canadian Rally Championship and the Rally America championship.

“It was a banner year for competition and a banner year for Yokohama,” confirmed Eric Dedoyard, president of Yokohama Tire (Canada) Inc. “Rally fans across the country enjoyed some of the best competition we’ve ever seen, and our teams demonstrated the superior performance and engineering of Yokohama tires in the most extreme conditions imaginable. A season like this makes us proud of our people and our products.”

Throughout the season, both teams relied on a selection of highly sophisticated Yokohama competition tires for the rough gravel roads and turned to Yokohama’s line of winter tires for the ice and snow conditions of winter rallies.