Sebastien Lindholm is set to restart under SupeRally rules on day two of Wales Rally GB after seeing his first outing in the all-new Suzuki SX4 ended by a rouge stone on the opening leg of the World Rally Championship season finale.
Following on from Nicolas Bernardi's outing in Corsica, the Welsh event marks the first gravel outing for
Suzuki's new WRC machine as development continues ahead of a full programme in 2008, with Lindholm going into the weekend looking to put further mileage on the car.
However, Lindholm saw his run come to an early end on the opening day when a loose stone thrown up on the first stage of the morning damaged a brake pipe on the car.
Although the Swede was able to drive slowly through the second stage, the decision was then taken to withdraw the car from the opening day on safety grounds while the team fixed the problem.
"It's a pity that we had this setback so early, but at least now we have a chance to get our car back to service and fix the brake pipe properly, so that we can continue to work on our testing programme for the remainder of the event," he said. "However, even during the short distance we have run, I can feel that the fundamental balance of the car is very good and that is an extremely positive sign for the future."
Lindholm will now resume action outside the top 50 and nearly half an hour away from the leaders but with the focus of the team being on testing rather than chasing outright results, team principal Nobuhiro Tajima said the goals at the start of the event hadn't changed.
"This is what testing is all about: identifying potential problems and solving them," he said. "Our objective at the start of the rally was to bring our car safely back to the finish with plenty of valuable information and this remains unaltered.
"Thanks to Sebastian's experience and his sensible approach, I am sure we can still get a lot out of the Rally Great Britain in these very difficult conditions. What we have suffered from today was just pure bad luck: we start again tomorrow!"
