Of the rest,
Mikko Hirvonen is still fourth, although he has lost a lot of ground to Gronholm and is now more than 25 seconds further back in the second
BP Ford Focus.
Further down the order
Francois Duval has managed to pull away from
Petter Solberg in his OMV Kronos-run
Citroen Xsara WRC and the gap has gone up from 9.6 seconds overnight to 33.6 seconds post-SS14.
Like on Friday though the Belgian’s pace was a bit erratic and while he did post some good times – including two third best results, he was also at the tail end of the top ten in three others.
Petter had no real issues this morning and his only problem on the repeat runs was a puncture in SS12. In general though he could not set the kind of times he would really like. Indeed he managed only one in the top five.
Stobart Ford’s
Jari-Matti Latvala and
Chris Atkinson complete the provisional points’ scorers, the former seemingly getting more and more comfortable as the event goes on.
Atkinson had a scare in SS8 this morning when he slide wide and hit a guardrail but other than that had little to report.
Xavier Pons and
Henning Solberg round out the top ten followed by
Matthew Wilson, Thomas Schie, Munchi’s runner,
Federico Villagra and BP Ford ‘third’ driver, Khalid Al-Qassimi - the latter two drivers’ the only movers in the top 14, as the top 12 remained exactly the same as it was at the end of day 1.
In the
FIA Junior Rally Championship category, Per-Gunnar Andersson now leads in his
Suzuki Swift after
Urmo Aava picked up a puncture in SS8 and had to stop to change the tyre. The Estonian dropped to third, more than a minute off P-G and 20 seconds or so off Martin Prokop, who moves up to P2.
In the end P-G finished the day 55.5 seconds up on Prokop and 1min 09.6secs ahead of Aava.
Jozef Beres and
Conrad Rautenbach round out the JRC top five, with Michal Kosciuszko sixth.
The action now concludes on Sunday, with SS15, the 16.32 kilometre-run through Riudecanyes 1, kicking off proceedings at 08.15 hours local time. Four tests - 86 competitive kilometres - will be held on day three to bring the Rally Catalunya to a close.
