Citroen team leader
Sebastien Loeb remains firmly in the lead following day two of the Rally RACC Catalunya-Costa Daurda, the twelfth round in this year’s World Rally Championship.
Loeb, who won all the tests on Friday, had to settle for four from six today, but that was still enough to see him practically double his overnight advantage in his Citroen C4 WRC car.
Indeed Loeb maintained his clean sweep this morning and set the pace in SS7, SS8 and SS9, to increase his cushion from 15.8 seconds to 23.7 seconds going into the mid-day service.
While in the afternoon
Mikko Hirvonen and
Francois Duval beat him in SS10 and SS12, Loeb still notched up another stage win - his tenth of the event - and he will now take a 27.7 second lead into Sunday's final leg.
Dani Sordo meanwhile remains second in the sister 'works' C4 WRC and while Duval did inch slightly closer, the gap between the two is still over 20 seconds - down just 1.8 seconds on what it was at the end of day 1.
Mikko Hirvonen completes the top four, but while he tried to close up on his Duval he actually lost ground. He now lies 13.2 seconds off his team-mate and the final place on the rostrum.
Further down the order,
Petter Solberg rounds out the top five, although the Norwegian came under increased pressure from
Urmo Aava on the repeat loop, who slashed the gap to just 1.4 seconds following SS12.
Subaru’s
Chris Atkinson and
Stobart Ford returnee
Jari-Matti Latvala complete the provisional points’ scorers, with Andreas Mikkelsen and
Matthew Wilson ninth and tenth respectively.
Of the rest,
Conrad Rautenbach is 11.3 seconds off Wilson in eleventh, while Brice Tirabassi is twelfth followed by
Henning Solberg,
Federico Villagra and Suzuki’s
Toni Gardemeister.
Gardemeister’s team-mate Per-Gunnar Andersson re-started this morning under the SupeRally, but after missing most of the opening day is way down the leaderboard and outside the top 40.
