Zasada, the three-time winner of the FIA European Rally Championship, will face the public vote on Tuesday as fans of the ERC decide whether he or Patrick Snijers should go through to the semi-final stage.
Speaking during Forum8 Rally Japan, where he was competing in the FIA WRC2 Challenger category, Chwist said: “It’s really nice that this voting is going on and I am proud. I will be voting for him of course and fingers crossed he will go further.
“When I started to be interested in rallying, he was not driving anymore but the spirit was always there, somehow I lived the history and knew all the stories and this forced me to be interested in rallying and to have something together with him.”
Chwist and Zasada competed against each other on Safari Rally Kenya in 2021 (below) when Zasada was 91 years old. The ERC hero, now 93, took part on an event in his native Poland earlier this year.
“It was the most amazing thing that we could drive on the same special stage together,” Chwist said of his Safari outing two years ago. “He almost got to the finish but bad luck before the finish of the last stage meant it was not possible, but he enjoyed it a lot and it was great him coming back.
“I never thought competing together would actually happen. I remember when he told me we could do the rally together I was really counting the days, it was really something special.”
The ERC Greatest Driver quarter-final voting begins tomorrow (Monday 20 November) with three-time European champions Kajetan Kajetanowicz and Luca Rossetti going head-to-head for victory.
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