Juan Pablo Raies meanwhile will drive the sister car and he too is confident. Indeed he has won the South American Rally Championship in the A8 class twice in the last two years and as such with extensive knowledge of the Argentinean roads he should be one to watch out for.
“It is always good to have a winning car and that is why we are confident of having a good rally in Argentina,” he added. “The idea is to score points for the Manufacturers’ and Drivers’ standings, using the experience that we have on this rally; we hope to score the first ones in our country. It’s going to be a hard rally, we will try to run pushing hard, but as safe as possible, and at the end of the rally we hope to get a good result.”
The Munchi’s team has also announced that they will take in the Rallye Deutschland, to make up for having to skip the Rally de Portugal after a family accident. The
FIA has given them permission to do this and as a result the team will still be eligible to score points in the manufacturers’ championship.
Production Car WRC:
The Rally Argentina is the third round in the FIA Production Car Rally Championship and of the 22 entries in the 2007 series, all but one of them have opted to take in this event, namely Mark Higgins.
Higgins won the last round in the championship, but has not nominated this event as he is taking in a round of the Irish Tarmac Championship instead, the Killarney International Rally. He currently lies fourth in the standings.
His absence means that Kristian Sohlberg and Toshi Arai will be out to make the most of it and pull further ahead in the race for the PWRC title - they currently lie in first and second in the championship. Both will be strong contenders in Argentina.
Other names to look out for include: Fumio Nutahara, last year’s runner-up, Anton Alen, Nasser Al-Attiyah, who took the PWRC title in 2006 and series returnee, Niall McShea, who took the title back in 2004.
