In addition to the 20 drivers’ who will be able to score points in the
FIA Junior Rally Championship category meanwhile, there will be a further 42 non-priority drivers’ - of which 19 will be battling it out for the Group N win, including PWRC runners, Andreas Aigner and Juho Hanninen.
Dani Sola will also be in action giving the new Honda Civic Type R R3 its debut in the WRC following on from his outing on the Sanremo Rally last weekend in the Intercontinental Rally Challenge.
"I'm really looking forward to competing at home in front of a strong field from the Junior Championship,” said the 2002 Junior champion. “The debut of the Honda Civic Type R R3 in Sanremo showed us that there was a lot of potential, and I want to underline that with a good result in Catalunya.
“The car is still of course extremely new, so this rally will be a big test and there are many questions. But hopefully our experience in Catalunya should go some way towards answering them. It's actually not a rally that I know particularly well since it moved to the south of Barcelona, but from what I can see it should suit our new Civic.”
Route:
The route is broadly similar to 2006 with the stages located in the Tarragona region, south of Barcelona. There are two new stages during the second leg and minor changes to two others but the remaining tests are identical to last year. The single service park at Salou's PortAventura theme park is also retained.
After Thursday evening's start ceremony in Salou, Friday's opening leg is the longest of the rally with 148.05 kilometres of competition. Saturday's second leg includes a double pass over Thursday's shakedown road but in the opposite direction. All tests except Friday's late afternoon stages are used twice.
There are 18 stages in total covering 352.87 kilometres in a total route of 1359.96 kilometres.
Last year:
Sebastien Loeb won the Rally Catalunya in 2006 to take his second Spanish win in succession, although it was a sombre victory following the death of Aaron Burkart's then co-driver, Jorg Bastuck on day 1.
