Murat Bostancı: We Are Ready for the Championship

The team, which leads the championship on 153 points after seven events, will bring Turkey its first European title in rallying in the teams' category if it keeps its lead at the end of Rally Liepaja in Latvia on 6-8 October.
The team is made up of three crews: Murat Bostancı-Onur Vatansever, Buğra Banaz-Burak Erdener and Ümit Can Özdemir-Batuhan Memişyazıcı, who will compete in the Ford Fiesta R2T. In the championship, which finishes with Rally Liepaja in Latvia, the team aims to hold on to the lead and win the first European rally title in the teams' standings.
Ahead of the final round of the championship, Murat Bostancı reviewed the season for TurkMotorspor.com: "After winning both the Turkish Rally Championship and the European Rally Trophy in 2015, we set the European Rally Championship as our next goal. To explain the difference between the European Rally Championship and the European Rally Trophy: if we take football as an example, the European Rally Trophy was a championship on the level of the UEFA Cup. We won that championship in 2015... The European Rally Championship we are in now is like football's Champions League. To succeed in this championship as Castrol Ford Team Türkiye, we put together a three-year programme. 2016 was purely a year of getting used to the championship and to stages we were seeing for the first time. This year was supposed to be our year of getting used to our new car, the Ford Fiesta R5. But in the meantime, my young team-mate Buğra Banaz and I carried on improving ourselves. While developing, we also consistently brought high points to the team in the teams' championship at every event, and carried Castrol Ford Team Türkiye into the lead of the European Rally Championship, and with one round to go our lead still stands.
In fact, we did not expect to be leading the European Rally Championship as a team in only our second year. But now that we are approaching the end of the championship, we will do everything we can to hold our position and try to win the title at the end of the season as the only Turkish team in Europe. Of course, it is not only us drivers and co-drivers and our cars on the road to this success. There is a big team effort behind us. What we are proudest of is that we have a 100 per cent Turkish team. With our drivers, co-drivers, technical staff and management, we are a 100 per cent Turkish team.
We are very proud to have taken the experience we have gained over the years in the Turkish Rally Championship and other international events to the level where we can be a Turkish team leading the European Rally Championship. We have one last event left in the championship, in Latvia, and I hope we bring the European Rally Teams' title to Turkey."