RallyRACC, day 1: The first day is for Sébastien Loeb (Citroën)

(21/10/2011)

Sébastien Loeb-Daniel Elena (Citroën). RallyRACC 2011

The current World Champions, Sébastien Loeb-Daniel Elena (Citroën DS3 WRC), lead the classification of the 47 RallyRACC Catalunya-COSTA DAURADA, Rally de España 2011, that today held the first of the three days of competition. The Citroën duo snatched the first position in the last stage of the day from the Finns Jari-Matti Latvala and Miikka Anttila (Ford Fiesta RS WRC), who suffered a puncture after leading in the two previous stages. The competitors had to face a hard and selective mixed day, with some important retirements and completely fulfilling the expectations.

After the first pass to the three different stages of the day, the gravel one of Pesells (25,74 km) and the two mixed stages of Terra Alta (35,94 km) and Les Garrigues (18,50 km), the differences between the top drivers were very small. Sébastien Loeb (Citroën) was leading the standings by 5,3 seconds over Jari-Matti Latvala (Ford) and 11,9 seconds ahead of Sébastien Ogier (Citroën), with Mikko Hirvonen (Ford) and Dani Sordo (Mini) next, less than a minute behind the leader.

In this first loop the situation suffered a dramatic change when no less than 10 of the 58 cars taking part in the race had to retire, among those, names as important as Petter Solberg (Citroën), Ott Tänak (Ford) and Ken Block (Ford), all of them due to off-track excursions, as well as Kimi Räikkonen (Citroën) and Hayden Paddon (Mitsubishi), both due to a failure and the first one not being able to reach the first stage. The dust generated by the cars in some gravel areas forced the organizers to increase the starting gap between cars in one minute for the second loop, thus being of 4 minutes for priority cars and 3 minutes for the rest.

After the service at PortAventura and just at the beginning of the second loop, Ford's Finn driver Jari-Matti Latvala won his first stage, taking the lead of the classification and repeating victory in the complicated stage of Terra Alta. At the end of this stage he was 16 seconds ahead of Loeb. The difficult last stage, that was also run in the dark, was the second stage victory for the French World Champion and combined with the puncture suffered by the then leader, as Jari-Matti Latvala broke the front wheel in that incident. That way, Loeb-Elena finished the day 30,6 seconds ahead of Latvala-Anttila and 54,2 in front of Hirvonen-Lehtinen. Dani Sordo (Mini) had visibility problems in the final stage that made him lose a position in the overall standings.

During the morning, the President of Catalonia, Artur Mas, visited the headquarters of the race at the PortAventura Conventions Centre. Tomorrow the second day will take place, this time completely on tarmac, repeating today's pattern, with three stages run twice: El Priorat (45,97 km), Riba-roja d’Ebre (12,27 km) and Punta de les Torres (13,53 km) with a total 143,54 timed kilometres. The first car will leave the Service Park in Port Aventura at 8:30 am, with a pass by mid afternoon to the Salou podium and finishing again in PortAventura Service Park at 18.21.

Classification of the 47 RallyRACC Catalunya-COSTA DAURADA, Rally de España 2011, after the 1st. day
1-Sébastien Loeb/Daniel Elena (Citroën DS3 WRC), 1h44’06”3
2-Jari-Matti Latvala/Miikka Anttila (Ford Fiesta RS WRC), a 30”6
3-Mikko Hirvonen/Jarmo Lehtinen (Ford Fiesta RS WRC), a 54”2
4-Sébastien Ogier/Julien Ingrassia (Citroën DS3 WRC), a 1’45”3
5-Dani Sordo/Carlos del Barrio (Mini John Cooper Works WRC), a 2’02”7
6-Kris Meeke/Paul Nagle (Mini John Cooper Works WRC), a 2’52”8
7-Mads Ostberg/Jonas Andersson (Ford Fiesta RS WRC), a 3’03”1
8-Henning Solberg/Ilka Minor (Ford Fiesta RS WRC), a 3’11”6
9-Evgeny Novikov/Denis Giraudet (Citroën DS3 WRC), a 4’24”8
10-Matthew Wilson/Scott Martin (Ford Fiesta RS WRC), a 5’16”8

For further info: www.rallyracc.com and @RallyRACC