Who will replace Latvala?

More drivers have been put into the ever growing mix of names of who will replace Jari-Matti Latvala on next month's Philips Rally Argentina.

Latvala fell whilst training in the Lapland region of Northern Finland, suffering a broken collarbone and ruling him out of the South American classic.

Ford have a big pool of drivers to choose from, with Evgney Novikov, Mads Ostberg, Ott Tanak and Henning Solberg all available and driving the Fiesta RS WRC. However, if Malcolm Wilson chooses one of these drivers, their respective teams will risk being thrown out of the Championship, fined €16,000 plus the rally entry fee. A gamble worth taking to get a works drive for one rally? No-one will know until the lucky name has been drawn.

Other drivers are also available, one being Marcus Gronholm. The double World Champion Finn ended his career with Ford in 2007, but returned for a one-off Rally Sweden outing in 2010, naturally armed with a semi-works Focus WRC.

A major outsider in the race for the temporarily vacated seat is Craig Breen. The Irishman has been more or less loyal to Ford since switching to rallying from karting a few years back. He has progressed through the ranks with the Blue Oval, winning the Irish Fiesta Trophy, the International Fiesta trophy and the WRC Academy. He also currently leads the S-WRC Championship in, you guessed it, a Ford Fiesta S2000. His only rally to date outside of a Ford was on the Circuit of Ireland Rally, driving a Peugeot 207 S2000 Evo.

Another, more surprising, name was also added to the mix recently. Rumours in Spanish media suggest that Dani Sordo has landed the seat. Sordo is currently under contract with Prodrive, the firm building and developing the MINI John Cooper Works WRC cars. They have elected to miss Argentina and Greece, owning to their lack of money. However, for this to work, Sordo would need to get Prodrive's permission, as he is said to be under a long-term contract with the former World Rally Championship winning engineering outfit.

A decision was meant to be made today (Monday) but nothing has been released yet, with a spokesperson for Ford stating: “We won’t be able to announce a driver until an agreement is finalised and we’re not there,” said the spokesperson. “There are many different options so until we have made a final decision, we won’t be able to make any announcement.”