Sébastien Ogier and Julien Ingrassia lead from Sébastien Loeb and Daniel Elena, so the overall classification of Rally Mexico hasn’t evolved during what has been an eventful second day! The Citroën Total World Rally Team crews still have a good lead over their rivals, and look set to give the DS3 WRC its first World Rally Championship victory.
The scenario of the sweeper and the hunter is one that has been repeated many time in the events run on gravel in the World Rally Championship, and today it thrilled all those following Rally Mexico. Sébastien Ogier, leading by a short head after the opening day and obliged to go first on the stages, played the first role. While sweeping the trajectories for one’s pursuers is never the most pleasant of tasks, it is even less so when the hunter is called Sébastien Loeb!
The seven-time world champion soon made short work of his young team-mate. Loeb set the fastest time in Ibarrilla 1 (SS11) despite a slow puncture in the final kilometers, and took first place in the overall classification by a few seconds. Ogier then ran into difficulties in Duarte, a narrow, dusty section, in which he lost some fifteen seconds to his rival. At the midday service halt the two DS3 WRCs were separated by twenty seconds.
“We knew that our second place on the road would give us an advantage over Sébastien, and we exploited it to the full to take first place,” summed up Loeb. “This twenty-second lead doesn’t give us any breathing space. We’ll have to continue to push if we want to be in a position to win tomorrow. At the same time, we’ll have to nurse the car that’s been given a fair hammering.”
Loeb, however, had no way of knowing that a bolt in the gear selection mechanism would stop him at the start of’Ibarrilla 2 (SS15). The crew of the no. 1 DS3 WRC started the stage five minutes late, which was transformed into a fifty-second road penalty. “We managed to fix it using one of the bolts from the rear bumper. Bravo to Daniel as he was the one who came up with this great idea,” underlined the seven-time world champion. This put Ogier back on top, but he too ran into a few glitches: “I found out that Seb had clocked in late at the finish of Ibarrilla. Even if I retook the lead it wasn’t good news as that’s not how I want to win. In Duarte 2 we lost more time not because of the sweeping, but because we lost power as the ignition went on the blink. It wasn’t a big problem and we managed to fix it.”
“While our DS3 WRCs are still in the lead of the race, we’ve run into a few teething troubles in this rally,” said Xavier Mestelan-Pinon, the Citroën Racing technical director. “Despite all the thousands of kilometers we covered in testing we knew that we could run into this type of situation in the race. Hats off to our crews who’ve shown ingenuity and sang-froid!”
At the end-of-the-day service halt before two more runs through the Léon super special, Ogier was 11.3s in front of his team-mate: “There are still three stages and around sixty
kilometers left tomorrow. We’re well placed even if our lead’s not very big, and we’ll really go for it to hang onto our first place.
Petter Solberg and Chris Patterson started the morning in thirteenth spot, and they set four fastest times today as they fought their way back up to fifth overall.