WRC: Gronholm maintains NZ lead

[Plex]

Marcus Gronholm has maintained his lead in the Rally New Zealand through the Friday afternoon stages.

Although his main rival Sebastien Loeb won the repeat runs through Pirongia West and Waitomo, he was only a few tenths faster than Gronholm each time, and remains 13 seconds adrift.

"This morning I lost a lot of time and now we are pushing like hell, but Marcus is doing the same," Loeb said.

"The times are exactly the same - even on a 43 kilometre stage the gap is less than one second, so what can we do? We'll see tomorrow, everything is possible."

Well aware of Loeb's reputation for making large gains on the second runs through stages, Gronholm said he had expected the Citroen driver to close in during the afternoon, but hoped he would continue to pull away on Saturday.

"I knew from many years' experience than he would fight back on the second loop, but we're not repeating the stages tomorrow," he said.

Mikko Hirvonen has already fallen into a very remote third place. As has so often been the case the last eighteen months, Ford's number two was unable to match the title contenders, but was comfortably faster than the rest of the field. He will start day two 49 seconds behind Gronholm, and with a 32 second cushion back to fourth place.

"Now the gap is quite big unfortunately, but at least I've found some rhythm now," Hirvonen said.

The fight for fourth is the closest battle in the top ten, with Subaru's Chris Atkinson, Stobart Ford's Jari-Matti Latvala and Citroen's Dani Sordo all within 12 seconds. Atkinson, who won the Mystery Creek superspecial that ended the day's action, intends to make his position more secure on leg two.

"It's not too bad, Dani's usually pretty good on the second passes and he's only taken one or two seconds out of us," he said. "We'll change some things on the car tonight and hopefully go faster tomorrow."

His teammate Xevi Pons had made a promising start to the event by outpacing Subaru number one Petter Solberg in the morning, but the Spaniard crashed out of the leg early in SS3.

Pons' departure moved Solberg up to seventh, 15 seconds behind Sordo. Although the former champion was mildly more content with his Subaru after struggling with the handling on the opening loop, he was still nowhere near as comfortable as Atkinson.

"It's better, but I'm struggling very badly," said Solberg. "The roads are cleaner now so I can keep the line better, but I can't go forward, it just feels like it's changing to a two wheel drive car."

Henning Solberg now holds eighth for Stobart Ford, with his earlier rival Manfred Stohl having put his OMV Kronos Citroen off the road in SS4.

With Pons and Stohl out, Junior points leader Urmo Aava has moved up to ninth on his third appearance in a Mitsubishi WRC car.

Matthew Wilson lost time with a costly error in the very first stage of the rally and had to struggle through two stages with his Ford's bonnet partially obscuring his view. He runs 10th.

Pos Driver Car Time
1. Gronholm Ford 1h 27:20.1
2. Loeb Citroen + 13.0
3. Hirvonen Ford + 49.2
4. Atkinson Subaru + 1:21.4
5. Latvala Ford + 1:29.2
6. Sordo Citroen + 1:33.5
7. P Solberg Subaru + 1:48.5
8. H Solberg Ford + 2:17.2
9. Aava Mitsubishi + 3:26.6
10. Wilson Ford + 4:29.7

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