Sebastien Loeb got his 2012 ADAC Rallye Deutschland off to a predictably strong start by setting the fastest time through the opening Mittelmosel stage.
The FIA World Rally Championship leader was 5.2 seconds quicker than second-placed Ford World Rally Team driver Petter Solberg.
"I was careful in the start for sure," Citroen driver Loeb reported. "it was muddy under the trees for the first five kilometres so I didn’t want to make a mistake there. When it was dry, I pushed a bit harder, but it was difficult, the stages are really narrow with concrete everywhere. I did a clean stage, not a perfect stage."
Solberg was highly encouraged to hold second place at this stage in the rally, with eight-time Rallye Deutschland winner Loeb still in sight.
Loeb’s team-mate Mikko Hirvonen is 8.7s off the lead in third, and has the second works Ford driver Jari-Matti Latvala and Citroen Junior’s Thierry Neuville with 1.2s of his tail.
While Hirvonen said he "needs to have more confidence when it’s dirty", Latvala put his time loss down to a tyre tactic that had not quite paid off.
"I tried something special on this stage. I had two soft tyres and two hard tyres. It was very good in the beginning where it was slippery, but maybe the stage was too long for the tyres and it was not so good when it dried," said Latvala, who will switch to hards all round for the next stages.
Ott Tanak is currently sixth for M-Sport Ford, but his team-mate Evgeny Novikov has already become the event’s first major retirement, parking his Ford Fiesta RS WRC on the stage. Tanak rued an early overshoot that he felt cost him several seconds.
The leading MINI is Dani Sordo’s Prodrive example in seventh, with returnee Chris Atkinson ninth on his first appearance with MINI Team Portugal - despite struggling with a stray water bottle rolling around the car’s pedals.
Mads Ostberg is between the two MINIs in his Adapta Ford, having slid off the road briefly while grappling with a brake worry. Sebastien Ogier completes the top 10 in Volkswagen Motorsport’s leading Skoda Fabia S2000.