The short Hagfors Sprint stage saw a little bit of rallying history, as hotly-tipped Ford protege Ott Tanak took his first stage win in the FIA World Rally Championship powered by Nokia.
The Go Fast Energy Ford driver is running a long way down the order after accidents both yesterday morning and this morning delayed him by nearly half an hour in total, but his raw pace is certainly not in doubt, as he demonstrated with a series of quick times leading up to his pacesetting run on stage 14.
Sebastien Loeb’s Citroen DS3 WRC was second quickest, allowing the champion to carve 5.6 seconds out of Henning Solberg’s advantage in their battle for sixth. The Go Fast Ford is now just 12.1s in front.
In the overall lead battle, Jari-Matti Latvala (Ford) was 0.6s quicker than Mikko Hirvonen’s Citroen on the stage, which means they are now 18.6s apart - to Hirvonen’s slight frustration.
"I made a couple of little mistakes on this stage and every tenth of a second counts so this is not good," he said.
"It’s just so close all the time - really pushing and on the limit."
Petter Solberg regained a little ground in the fight for third, and now has a 7.2s gap back to Mads Ostberg.
Stage 14 also saw a breakthrough for Nasser Al-Attiyah, who was an impressive fourth quickest as he continued to learn more about the Citroen DS3 and snow rallying.