Acropolis: Ford World Rally Team - After SS 13Fifty-six of the original 64 starters left Markopoulo this morning for the second leg of this eighth round of the FIA World Rally Championship. Five cars are competing under SupeRally regulations having retired yesterday. They
face the toughest leg of the four-day rally with 146.08km of competition lined up, much of it west of Athens in the area around Korinthos.
The action began with the marathon 48.88km Agii Theodori stage, the longest test of the season to date and a tough challenge for drivers, cars and tyres. Overnight leaders Marcus Grönholm and Timo Rautiainen and BP-Ford World Rally Team colleagues Mikko Hirvonen and Jarmo Lehtinen chose BFGoodrich's hard compound tyres for their Focus RS World Rally Cars. It was the obvious choice given the hard, rocky surface and the ever-rising temperatures.
Grönholm powered through the stage to set fastest time and extend his lead to 20.1sec. The 39-year-old Finn was then second on the next three stages to return to service with a lead of 15.8sec.
"My lead has widened but it's not big enough to relax on a rally as tough as the Acropolis," he said. "I'm going to continue driving fast because Solberg and Loeb aren't sleeping."
"I was conscious of looking after the tyres towards the end of the long stage.
That will be really hard this afternoon because it will be rougher and hotter. It's hard not to puncture when there are so many stones. I just want to finish the long stage safely because 16sec is not a big lead on a 48km test," he said.
Team-mate Hirvonen restarted in fifth but the 26-year-old Finn was lucky to drop only 25sec after a high-speed crash about 5km from the start of Agii Theodori.
"I went off on a flat-out fourth gear right-hand bend at about 150kph," he said. "I went about 60m off the road into the trees and bushes in the forest. I had no idea where I was and had to find my way back to the road. It was the fastest part of the stage and I was just waiting to hit something. I was very lucky because the only damage was a broken windscreen."
"After that I was OK in the shade but in the sun it was hard to see through the cracks. The roof ventilation flap closed and we had no air in the car for the rest of the stage, but a lot of dust. It was extremely hot," he related.
Rules prevented the team from fitting a new screen at the remote service in Loutraki so Hirvonen had to persevere through the remaining three stages. He climbed to fourth on the penultimate test after the retirement of Dani Sordo and is 1min 27.0sec behind Grönholm.
"The car was fine afterwards but I was worried about the screen breaking completely if we had a heavy landing," Mikko added.
Ford World Rally Team
