Schwarz promises: I'll be ok for Sweden.

Skoda team leader, Armin Schwarz has revealed that he is 'confident' he will be able to compete at the Swedish Rally in two weeks time, despite his big accident last Saturday, on the Rallye Monte Carlo.

"On Monday I saw my physio, and we worked out a way to get me fit in time for Sweden," he told his personal website. "I am confident this is possible. As soon as I've got news I'll let you know."

Schwarz, who crashed in SS7 of the event, injured his shoulder in the incident.

"On the seventh stage I had to steer my Fabia WRC into a wall approaching a hairpin because the throttle got stuck open and there was no other way of avoiding a high speed crash," he explained. "I braked as hard as possible, but this didn't really help because the brake cooling had been playing up for most of the stage before the hairpin, and there was strong fading.

"We rolled and slid backwards into the ditch, which was one metre deep. I hit my seat very hard and dislocated one shoulder. With the newly introduced HANS system it is at present not yet possible to fix your upper body really tight to the seat.

"It took a long time before a doctor turned up at my car. In the hospital I got a little idea how it must have been in the wild-west, when the doctor put my bones back into place without any injection to fight the pain. I never had such pain in my life - lucky me!

"After our tests for the Monte had gone well, we expected a decent performance but we were held up by some technical problems. That's a pity. Only in SS6 were we able to show the potential of the car when we set the seventh fastest time, although our brake cooling was faulty on the last three kilometres and we had a lot of steam with almost zero visibility in the cockpit."