Jari

Jari-Matti Latvala leads the World Rally Championship Rally Spain heading into Sunday’s final six stages, but that position might not be cause for celebration.

Latvala moved in front on Saturday’s second-to-last test, which counted as the event’s Power Stage and was used to determine the running order for Sunday’s final stages, when Dani Sordo, his closest rival for victory, slowed to avoid running at the head of the field on the mainly gravel-based stages on Sunday.

At the overnight halt in Salou, Latvala heads Sordo by 1.6 seconds with Thierry Neuville third, 29.3 seconds back of the leader. Latvala now faces the prospect of being the first driver to make a path through the loose surface gravel on Sunday. With grip levels and braking accuracy compromised, the Volkswagen pilot expects to lose time.

“I need some luck with the weather to win tomorrow because it won’t be easy first car on the road,” said Latvala, who suffered a further setback when Thierry Neuville won the Power Stage to secure three bonus points. It means Neuville’s lead over Latvala in his quest to finish runner-up to Sbastien Ogier in the final championship standings effectively rises to 20 points.

That Latvala is leading at all owes everything to the misfortune that befell his teammate Sbastien Ogier. The world champion was in front by 6.5 secs starting Saturday’s third stage when a front-left tire puncture dropped him down the order.

“There were 11 kilometers to go,” said Ogier, who won the opening three stages on Friday night but then struggled to hit top form on Saturday morning due to a bout of understeer. “I took a cut, which I had in my notes, but in the grass there was something we didn’t see so we have to check with our gravel crew. I don’t know what it was but I felt an impact. It was quite OK until the last four kilometers but then it was really bad. I had a feeling I had a double puncture on the front because it was impossible to turn. I really slowed down and lost a lot on the last kilometers.”

Despite completing Day 2 46.5 seconds off the lead, Ogier isn’t conceding an eighth victory of 2013. “I don’t know what’s possible but I will push hard to see what we can get. There are 140 kilometers of stages so you never know.”

Andreas Mikkelsen, in the third works Volkswagen Polo, started Day 2 in sixth position but retired after breaking his car’s rear suspension running wide into a ditch on the first stage of the morning. “It looked like a normal ditch but there was a stone there that hit the tire. Something was going in the wrong direction after that,” he said.

Nasser Al-Attiyah also failed to make it through the second day when he crashed out of 11th place on the Power Stage. His Qatar M-Sport teammate Elfyn Evans retired on the day-closing Salou street test when he broke a wheel on a curb. The young Briton was second to Formula One race winner Robert Kubica in the WRC 2 category at the time of his exit.

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