End of Day 1. Petter Solberg leads the Citroen 1-2-3-4 with Sebastien Ogier in second, Sebastien Loeb third & Dani Sordo rounding off the Citroen lock-out of the top four spots. All the Citroens performing well today, all except one. 2007 Formula One World Champion Kimi Raikkonen, on his debut season with Citroen, had a rally, all be it a short one, to forget. The former Ferrari star hit a rock on the opening stage of the rally, Alfaro 1, which apperantly caused some minor suspension damage, & then on SS2 the C4 ground to a halt for around 35 minutes when an electrical connector came loose in the fuel pump. Kimi said afterwards that “It was a simple problem to fix, but it took us a long time finding it”. Later on that day, on SS7, the stage that would decide the running order on Day 2, Raikkonen clipped a bank on the inside of a fast right-hander & rolled the car several times into retirement. Citroen Racing later announced that the C4 was too badly damaged to continue under SupeRally rules.
Outside the top four places, Ford dominated the rest of the top ten. Jari-Matti Latvala held fifth ahead of factory team-mate Mikko Hirvonen. Henning Solberg was in seventh, Matt Wilson eighth, Federico Villagra ninth for the Munchis Ford World Rally Team & Ken Block, on his debut with Ford held a respectable tenth. Mikko Hirvonen was complaning about the sandy surface on the road which ment the first car out took most of the sand off the road surface, leaving it easier for the rest of the field to get down to the gravel base. This was, apperantly, the reason he had such a deficit to Solberg. Mikko also reported a huge moment on one of the opening stages, where he hit a concrete post which then bounced him into a ditch. Hirvonen got out of the ditch without too much time being lost.
In the newly formed S-WRC, Xevi Pons leads Martin Prokop by a shade over eight seconds. The two drivers, both in new Ford Fiestas, have been battling it out over the course of Fridays nine special stages. Over a minute back in third is the Qatari driver in Nasser Al-Attiyah, driving a Rene-Georges Rallysport Skoda Fabia.
In the P-WRC Armindo Araujo leads Toshi Arai by 5.6 seconds. Miguel Angel Baldoni is in third, over two minutes & fourty two seconds off the pace.
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