The 1st Rally Italia Sardinia takes place this coming weekend - the thirteenth round out of sixteen in the 2004
FIA World Rally Championship.
Sardinia will also play host to the sixth round in the 2004 FIA Junior WRC.
Following a ceremonial start in the resort of Porto Cervo on Thursday evening, the competition will begin on Friday morning when crews head into the mountains to contest the first of 19 special stages.
Based around a single service point in the town of Olbia, 31km from Porto Cervo, the event includes nine repeated stages, and one other, making a total distance of 384.23 competitive kilometres.
With thirty per cent of the total route driven competitively, the rally is one of the most compact of the season.
The three-day rally will conclude when the winning car crosses the finish ramp in Porto Cervo at 1645hrs on Sunday, 3 October.
Special notes:
Previously hosted in the Italian Riviera town of Sanremo, this year the Italian round of WRC moves to the Mediterranean island of Sardinia where sandy gravel tracks will replace the twisty, asphalt stages of the Southern Alps.
Based in the spectacular mountain landscape of the north east of the island, the narrow, technical stages feature medium-soft gravel on a hard-packed base.
Weather conditions are expected to be mild, but with some stages taking crews to altitudes of more than 1,000 metres above sea level, rain is a distinct possibility.
A new event to the World Rally Championship, Rally Italia Sardinia is based on the Island's Costa Smeralda Rally, previously a round of the Italian and European Championships.
FIA World Rally Championship news:
Sebastien Loeb leads the World Rally drivers' championship, 28 points ahead of
Petter Solberg.
Citroen meanwhile head the constructors' - 38 points ahead of Ford, while
Subaru are a further 20 adrift in third.
News from the Manufacturers' teams:
555 Subaru World Rally Team:
[Petter Solberg, car #1 and
Mikko Hirvonen, car #2.]
In common with the majority of WRC drivers, Petter Solberg and Mikko Hirvonen will be drawing on their knowledge of other similar gravel events, such as Argentina, as they make their Sardinia Rally debuts this week. Hirvonen though does have some experience of Sardinia...
"I've competed in Sardinia two times before on different rallies - so I know a little of what to expect," he explained. "Sardinia is not as rough as Greece and Turkey, it's quite narrow, slippery and medium-slow with some fast sections. It will be a good rally I think, everyone's driving will have to be neat and it will certainly be more excellent experience for me. It was so wet in GB that I'm hoping it will be dry in Sardinia."
Citroen Total:
[
Sebastien Loeb, car #3 and Carlos Sainz, car #4]
"I had never been to Sardinia prior to our tests there. I am quite sensitive to the settings new rallies take us to and I must say I liked what I saw," said Loeb. "The climate is nice, the place has that Mediterranean feel about it and the hilly scenery with those big round boulders is something I've never come across before. As for the rally itself, I don't yet know whether the test stages we used are really representative of what we will actually compete on. We will find out during the recce. If they do prove similar, then there shouldn't be too much vertical suspension travel and the surface won't be that hard. We found that the very hard packed gravel base didn't cut up all that much. Our test stages were quite narrow and it was best not to stray onto the verges which were very rocky. There are also places where you really have to brake hard, and it could be easy to make a mistake."
