Loeb rolls back the years with Spain victory

Top 15 results from WRC's Rally RACC Catalunya

Sebatien Loeb has clinched his first World Rally Championship victory in over five years with a surprise triumph at RallyRACC Catalunya for Citroen, as Sebastien Ogier grabs the title lead from Thierry Neuville.

Loeb produced two blitzing stage wins to take the lead by 7.1 seconds on Sunday's opening run before the final two stages to go with Toyota Gazoo Racing's Jari-Matti Latvala chasing.

But Latvala was effectively out of the victory hunt when he hit a rock and punctured on SS17 to drop down the order which promoted defending WRC champion Ogier into second place.

Sensing a key victory for his title hopes, Ogier missed out by just 2.9s at the finish, with Ott Tanak taking the Power Stage victory ahead of him, to see Loeb hold on for a famous win.

It marks the nine-time WRC champion’s first win since the 2013 Rally Argentina and first triumph in Spain for in seven years.

Ogier may have had to settle for second place but coupled with third place on the Power Stage he has retaken the WRC championship lead from Neuville by three points with one round to go in Australia next month.

Neuville suffered a nightmare Power Stage narrowly missing out on the points in sixth place due to a late puncture which also dropped him to fourth place behind M-Sport Ford’s Elfyn Evans who scrambled the final podium place for his first rostrum since Portugal in May.

Local star Dani Sordo grabbed fifth place having faded during Saturday’s second loop, with Tanak’s late surge giving him sixth place for Toyota. Tanak’s points keeps him just about in the WRC title race going into the final round as he trails Ogier by 24 points with a maximum of 30 points left to score.

With Toyota teammates Esapekka Lappi and Latvala slotting into seventh and eighth respectively, Craig Breen (Citroen) and Andreas Mikkelsen (Hyundai) rounded out the points places.

Jan Kopecky claimed victory in the WRC2 class for Skoda with a comfortable 1m 28s lead over Petter Solberg who debuted the Volkswagen Polo GTI R5 in fine style.