Rally Finland

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Rally Finland
Esapekka Lappi at the 2022 Rally Finland
Status	Active
Genre	Motorsporting event
Date(s)	July–August
Frequency	Annual
Location(s)	Finnish Lakeland
Country	Finland
Inaugurated	1951 (1951)

Rally Finland (formerly known as the Neste Rally Finland, Neste Oil Rally Finland, 1000 Lakes Rally and Rally of the Thousand Lakes; Finnish: Suomen ralli, Swedish: Finska rallyt) is a rally competition in the Finnish Lakeland in Central Finland. The rally is driven on wide and smooth gravel roads, featuring blind crests and big jumps. It is the fastest event in the World Rally Championship and has been dubbed the "Grand Prix of Rallying" and the "Grand Prix on Gravel". Rally Finland is among the largest annually organised public events in the Nordic countries, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators each year. The rally has been known to be very difficult for non-Nordic drivers; only seven drivers from countries other than Finland or Sweden have won the event- in the 1980s and before, the field was made up almost entirely of Finnish and Swedish drivers.

The city of Jyväskylä in the Central Finland region has often served as the main venue for Finnish rally competitions,^[1][2] because Rally Finland was first held under the name Jyväskylän Suurajot (Jyväskylä Grand Prix) in 1951. Originally an endurance event that stretched to Lapland in Northern Finland, the rally was at the forefront of the adoption of the modern rally format, splitting the route into a number of special stages in the mid-1950s. With increasing international attention, it became part of the European Rally Championship programme in 1959. After the start of the World Rally Championship in 1973, the event became the Finnish round in the series. Rally Finland is now among the most popular and prestigious rallies in the championship.