BFGoodrich: Tyres choice could be deciding factor.

Tyre choices in Germany can be just as difficult as at the season opening, Rallye Monte Carlo, that's the verdict of BF Goodrich's chief technician, Patrick Letort.

Speaking ahead of the tenth round in the 2007 FIA World Rally Championship, the ADAC Rallye Deutschland, which gets underway 'proper' this Friday, Letort explained that the unpredictable weather, often encountered on the banks of the Mosel River and in the Hunsr?ck and Saarland regions, is likely to be a major talking point this weekend.

Indeed ever since the Rallye Deutschland joined the WRC in 2002, rain has played an important role, making tyre choices difficult, at best, or occasionally a gamble, at worst.

"This event can be really complex," Letort noted. "The weather has always tended to be quite unstable in the valleys of this region.

"At the service park in Trier, the drivers have to choose tyres for groups of three or four stages at a time. In the course of the same, loop, certain stages can be perfectly dry while others take place in pouring rain, depending on where the storms break out.

"Tyre choices are as difficult in Germany then as they are on the Monte Carlo Rally and they have always influenced the final outcome to a greater or lesser degree."

Last year a bold tyre choice on the opening day helped Sebastien Loeb lay the foundations for his fifth successive win in Germany and he is again likely to be the man to beat this time out too.

Michel Ducher, the BFGoodrich technician delegated to work with Citro?n and who participated in the decision, recalls: "The weather experts predicted the possibility of showers on Friday morning's three stages [in 2006] even though the roads were completely dry as the cars pulled out of service.

"We opted for the '0+' compound g-Force Profiler, a soft compound dry weather tyre which functions at its ideal temperature in the wet. The rain arrived as forecast and the end of the day saw three Citroens in the top three places: Loeb, [Dani] Sordo and [Toni] Gardemeister."

Loeb eventually went on to win by more than 1.5 minutes, with Marcus Gronholm a very distant third, over 2 minutes further back in his Ford Focus RS WRC, never able to recover.

For the record, if Seb does win again in Germany this Sunday he will set a new benchmark for the highest number of consecutive wins on the same FIA World Rally Championship event.