A gripping close Japanese WRC race finished with Sebastian Loeb taking a record 27th race win, overtaking the old record holder Carlos Sainz with 26 wins.
The impressive thing about Loeb's record however is that he has done this in just 4 years.
However the story of the race is not the win by Loeb, but rather the battle between him and Marcus Gronholm, making for the closest rally since Germany 2002.
Marcus lead the race all through the first day, partly because Loeb was running first on the gravel stages, acting as a road cleaner. But it was obvious from the outset that the Fin wanted to win the rally.
He extended his lead in the morning of day 2, and was looking very quick. Loeb was struggling to match the pace, even though he was now running behind Gronholm on the stages, making more than one uncharacteristic mistake on the stages.
However, it seems Gronholm was trying a little too hard, and overstretched either his talent, or the BP-Ford Focus and made a small mistake going into a corner on stage 14. This led to him trying to make up for the error, but instead forcing himself into another error on the stage. Gronholm ended up losing 23.7 seconds to Loeb, relegating himself to 2nd, and 17.4 seconds behind. He then lost another 10 seconds to Loeb on stage 15, and was looking annoyed with himself at the end of the stage.
Gronholm however was not going to let Loeb take the race easily. He showed how good a driver he actually is. He won almost all of the stages after this, and got to within 6 seconds of Loeb, with only the last Super Special stage left.
However Loeb proved that he is still brilliant on tarmac and took the win of the Super Special and the rally.
It does however show that the BP-Ford Focus got a lot quicker, and is certainly now a match for the Kronos Citroen in pace. Also Loeb now know that unless next years Citroen C4 WRC is a fast, reliable car from the offset, then Gronholm and the now sorted Ford will be a definite challenger for the title.
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