Round 5 of the championship saw the italian rally return after a year away.
Rally Sardinia began with the exciting news-Volkswagen officially announced its intent to enter the WRC with the Polo R WRC. The VW campaign will begin in 2013 with a 5 year commitment to WRC competition.
The exciting announcement was made the same weekend that the MINI John Cooper Works WRC car made its debut to the championship. Drivers Kris Meeke and Dani Sordo showed the pace of their new car.
Dani Sordo managed a 6th place overall, a great start for the Mini team but unfortunately Meeke had some problems. He set a faster time than champion Sebastien Loeb on the opening stage,then set the 3rd fastest time on the 2nd stage, putting him in 4th overall. But on the next stage Meeke felt something braking for a 5th gear corner and ran wide into some loose gravel. He was forced to retire from the day and restart under Super Rally rules on the following day, which put him out of the running.
Meeke wasnt the only one to have problems in Sardinia.
Ford man Jari-Matti Latvala's rally was over just as it started when he rolled his Fiesta on the very first stage. The roll was a result of an error in the pacenotes called by his co-driver. Latvala was able to restart the following day, but was only able to battle his way back to 18th place.
After a long battle with Mikko Hirvonen, world champion Sebastien Loeb took his 64th career WRC victory despite being forced to clean the roads throughout the entire rally. “Leading from nearly the start that’s really a good job,” said Loeb. “Mikko was pushing very hard behind so we really had to take big risks all the time. We lost time in some places because of the cleaning but we took it back in some other places. It was really a hard fight but I did not believe at the start of the rally that I could make it like this.”
Mikko Hirvonen made up for missing out on the win, by coming second and picking up 3 extra points for winning the powerstage.
Norwegian Petter Solberg finally got a break from all the bad luck, finishing in third place, despite some minor problems picking up his first podium of the season.Solberg was just 5.8 seconds behind Mikko going into the power stage, but it was too large of a gap to be made up and Solberg was forced to settle for the 3rd and final podium spot.
Sebastien Ogier started the final day of the rally sitting 4.9 seconds ahead of Petter, but a broken suspension on the 2nd to last stage forced Ogier to settle for a 4th place finish.
Sebasitien Loeb's win and Ogier's 4th place kept the Citroen team ontop of the manufacturers championship, 17 points ahead of their rivals the Ford WRT.
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