‘There are lots of rallies and it's still a long way to go'Sardinia winner Markus Gronholm admitted that he was surprised to hear that
Sebastien Loeb had effectively crashed out of the rally on Sunday, handing the BP Ford driver a relatively comfortable victory.
Gronholm
however points out that were it not for shock absorber problems early on, he would have been challenging for the win anyway.
“I just heard when I came to the finish of the first stage in the morning,” he explained in the post rally press conference. “I heard that he stopped on the stage but didn't know why. That was the first I heard. I was a little bit surprised, yes. I think it's easy to calculate that without our problems we would have been equal with Sebastien. This time we had the feeling and the car was good, so it would have been a really hard fight today I think.”
Gronholm's team-mate Mikko Hirvonen claimed second position and he too was surprised that the order did not remain static on the third leg.
"This morning I was expecting everybody just to calm down and take the positions that they were in, so in that moment it was a big surprise that he made a mistake and we managed to get up to second."
The end result was a BP Ford one-two result with the team now heading the manufacturer's standings with 99 points to the 78 on the board at rivals Citroen. Naturally team boss Malcolm Wilson was particularly pleased with the result.
"I think everyone's probably as shocked as we were to see Sebastien actually make a mistake, but there were some new stages, and they were obviously quite difficult," Wilson explained. "Having said that, having the lead he had, it was basically in his control. We were watching the stage on the map and first of all Marcus stopped. And I can tell you there was a lot of activity in our management office, because we didn't know what had happened."
"He obviously had a spin or something. And we're also reflecting on that. The next thing the dot went blue for Sébastien (on the tracking system), and we thought maybe it was just the system or something playing up. Obviously we watched and watched to see if he got going again like Marcus did, and then we heard the news that he'd gone off. Yes, a big surprise."
Gronholm now leads the championship chase by seven points over Loeb but the Finn admits that the title race is still wide open despite Loeb's uncharacteristic mistake.
“Everything is still open. But it's good and the next rally is Greece which we won last time,” Gronholm said. “Then it's Finland and we will have a little bit of a more updated car. The future looks very very good, but no, it's not a turning point yet. There are lots of rallies to come and it's still a long way to go…”
Source FIA
