Jari-Matti Latvala [BP Ford Abu Dhabi WRT]:
"I started with plenty of confidence after Sweden and felt relaxed. It's a big surprise for me to lead because my pre-event target was to look for a podium. It's more than I expected or dreamed about. I kept a good pace all day and the whole package has worked well – car, driver, co-driver and tyres. I had some big impacts on stones this morning but Pirelli's tyres stood up well.
"It will be interesting to be first in the start order tomorrow on the gravely roads, but I was second today and there's not such a big difference. I don't want to think about it too much, I just want to get into the car and see what happens. The plan is to drive in the same way as I did on the slippery roads this morning. The stages are tricky so I need to find the same relaxed feeling."
Sebastien Loeb [Citroen Total WRT]:
"I had a bit of trouble settling in during the morning's loop. The stages hadn't been swept sufficiently clean by the drivers ahead of us on the road and the grip available with our hard compound Pirelli Scorpion tyres wasn't ideal. We tried to counter that by making a small change to our set-up before the start of SS2, which paid off. We managed to close to within 4.4s of the lead and we kept to the same rhythm this afternoon to maintain the gap at less than 10 seconds. We will work a little more on the set-up during this evening's service halt with the intention of pushing hard again tomorrow."
Chris Atkinson [Subaru WRT]:
"Today has not been bad for us and we’re in a good position to push hard tomorrow. We’ll have to see whether we can close the gap to Sebastien and Jari-Matti as it won’t be easy. It was my mistake to spin in the final stage, and giving a few seconds away to these guys isn’t the smartest, but that’s how it goes. It won’t be easy for sure, and I have Petter and Hirvonen behind so we will push hard as always and see."
Petter Solberg [Subaru WRT]:
"Considering we lost a minute this morning, fourth today is not bad. We have won two stages, and we are pushing so hard but it will not be easy. We have two tough days left. The rocks in the stages this afternoon were incredible, just right in the middle of the road. They were so big, I don’t know how they got there. If I didn’t go off the road to avoid them, that would have been it. When you’re going flat out, it’s hard to avoid things like that but you still just have to commit."
Mikko Hirvonen [BP Ford Abu Dhabi WRT]:
"I don't know what I hit [in SS5 this afternoon] but I slid wide in a couple of corners towards some stones so maybe that was the cause. There was a crack in the wheel rim and slowly the tyre lost air before coming off the rim completely with about 3km to go. It was a slow puncture so I decided not to stop to change it and drove for about 15km like that. It was the right decision.
