Finland - leg 3: Gronholm sets new WRC record.

Sunday, 5th August 2007

Rally Finland - Day 3 report: Gronholm and Ford dominate in Finland, as new 2007 spec Focus shines on debut.

Previous Page

Loeb for his part never looked likely to challenge the Fords and in the end he finished over a minute off Gronholm – only beating the Finn on the first test on Saturday. Other than that the Frenchman was always pretty much third best and unsurprisingly he was none to happy at the finish.

He will now be hoping that his Citroen C4 WRC will be more competitive on the next event, when the WRC heads to Germany, an event he has dominated since it joined the WRC schedule in 2002.

Chris Atkinson brought his Subaru home in fourth place overall after a very solid drive. Granted in the end he was over 3 minutes off the winner – and 2 minutes off Loeb, but he also finished comfortably ahead of Henning Solberg, who was fifth for the Stobart team.

In total he set 20 top five stage times, the highlight a third best time on Saturday, on the first run through the 33.01 kilometre Ouninpohja test, one of the most famous and fastest in the WRC.

Henning was content with fifth place, especially as he felt a bit rusty to begin with following the long summer break. Unlike the likes of Gronholm and Loeb, he didn’t get the chance to test that much in June and July and found it took him a while to get in the swing of things.

Although he had a few minor problems during the event, including a clutch issue in SS7, he found more and more speed as the event progressed and set eight top five times in the final nine stages, including a third best time in SS18.

Further down the order, Xavier Pons was sixth on his debut with the Subaru World Rally Team and as he got more and more confidence in the Impreza so his times improved, culminating with a fourth best stage time on SS23, the final test.

Suzuki’s JRC runner, Urmo Aava took seventh position in his privately entered Mitsubishi Lancer WRC. It was the first time he has scored ‘senior’ WRC points and considering this was only his second outing with the car in the WRC, it was all the more impressive that he brought it home and scored two points.