“It feels very good. For sure it was a very difficult race with the other drivers dropping behind me to make me clean the road. But finally we won and in the end it was a big relief and maybe the best win of my career.” he said.
Loeb began Day 3 with only 1.5 secs ahead of team-mate Sebastian Ogier, with Jari-Matti Latvala holding third, a further 1.6 secs behind Ogier, after the Citroen's road-order plans backfired. Loeb was expected to struggle cleaning the stages, but when it rained during the night Loeb knew he would be facing the same roads as Ogier. When the morning came and when SS12 and SS13 came about, Loeb set about winning them in such style that he extended his lead to 9.5 secs over Ogier. Disaster struck Ogier when, during the heavily rutted afternoon stages, he suffered a left-front puncture. Loeb seemingly had time to relax, but Jari-Matti Latvala began to cut the deficit to Loeb, eventually down to 8.2 secs at the end.
Latvala may have won the event, if he didn't have his rear traction problem in the morning. Changing the rear diff preload setting sorted the problem out, but by now it was too late: “It was a tough weekend and I woke up a little bit too late. Of course it’s a disappointment not to win but it’s been a great rally.”
If there was a drive of the rally award, Mikko Hirvonen would have been a firm favourite to win the award. Plummeting down to 36th overall after problems, caused by hitting one of the very unforgiving Finnish trees on SS1, over the first three stages. He began Day 2 over 2 mins off the lead and threw caution to the wind and stormed through the field to move right back up to fourth, gaining back 50 secs. He took an impressive 12 stage wins (55% of all the stages of the rally) brought him up to fourth, only 1 min 9 secs off the lead. Another boost for Hirvonen came in the form of fastest time over the rally ending Power Stage.
Petter Solberg endured a frustrating rally, never really being able to get up to the pace of the leaders in his Citroen DS3 WRC. He finished fifth, 7.1 secs behind Mikko Hirvonen, after beginning Day 3 over 1 min ahead of Hirvonen. Behind Solberg is another Norwegian, this time Mads Ostberg in his Stobart Fiesta RS WRC. He tried to take fifth place from Solberg, but it never happened. Ostberg (sporting a black armband as a mark of respect to the victims of the attacks in Norway last week) happy with being able to take the fight to the top drivers. Henning Solberg and Mads Ostberg in the other two Stobart Fiesta's took seventh & eighth, respectively.
Kimi Raikkonen took ninth in his ICE 1 Racing DS3 WRC, but his co-driver Kaj Lindstrom said that they may well have taken seventh if a spin on SS17 hadn't happened. Juho Hanninen rounded out the points scorers in tenth, and took the S-WRC trophy for the second year running.
The MINI's of Kris Meeke & Dani Sordo were performing well during the final day, running in 10th & 7th overall, respectively. Things took a turn for the worse, however, when Meeke picked up a puncture on SS14, and dropped to 14th. Then, barely a stage later, both Meeke and Sordo emerged from the 18th test of the rally with blocked radiators. Meeke, guided by the team back at service, tried to clear the offending sand out of the radiator, but the team decided to withdraw Meeke's car. Sordo's rally only went one stage further, retiring with the same problem as Meeke on SS20.
(S-WRC report to follow)
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