Mikko set top five times in every single stage in a bid to try and stay in touch with the two top, should either have a problem. Despite that though, he is now more than a minute off Loeb and Gronholm, although with his nearest rival 50 seconds further back, providing he doesn't do anything silly on Sunday he is virtually assured of a place on the rostrum.
Further down the order,
Jari-Matti Latvala is engaged in fierce battle for fourth with
Subaru's
Chris Atkinson. Latvala moved up to P4 in the first test of the day in his
Stobart Ford Focus RS WRC and then pulled out a 10 second cushion in the final two stages.
Dani Sordo completes the top six and while he had been on the fringes of the battle for fourth on Friday, he lost ground this morning and dropped 19.8 seconds back in the #2
Citroen C4 WRC. He eventually finished the day 35 seconds off Atkinson.
Petter Solberg is next up in seventh and still far from happy with his Subaru Impreza WRC, despite the best efforts of ‘his' team to try and ‘fix' things. In the end though ‘Hollywood' reckoned that if anything the car was actually worst today than it was on Friday.
Suzuki's Junior Rally Championship star,
Urmo Aava rounds out the provisional points' scorers in his privately entered Mitsubishi Lancer WRC05. The Estonian took eighth in the third test on Saturday, when Stobart Ford man
Henning Solberg lost time after hitting a bank.
The Norwegian had to stop twice in Franklin to try and clear mud from the radiator of his Focus and as a result lost over 5 minutes, tumbling down to tenth, behind Aava - and
Matthew Wilson, who is ninth in the ‘third' Stobart Ford entry, which is not nominated to score manufacturers' points.
Of the rest, Munchi's Ford's duo
Federico Villagra and
Luis Perez Companc are eleventh and thirteenth respectively, sandwiching Britain's Alister McRae who is currently on course to take the Group N honours.
