Despite a clean sweep of stage wins today, Markko Martin couldn’t overtake Sebastien Loeb for the lead in San Remo. Loeb held tough all day, and kept Martin in his sights, taking four straight second place times. Martin could have chipped away more time on Loeb, but he took a twenty second penalty after spending too much in service. In a testament to how far the Citroen Xsara and Ford Focus have come, Marcus Gronholm (currently third) and Gilles Panizzi (currently fifth) have said they feel they are going flat out, and simply can’t match the pace of the leaders. This must be extremely disheartening news to Richard Burns, who has to watch his championship lead disappear knowing there are two more tarmac rallies left.

Carlos Sainz will keep his championship bid on track if he can hold fourth place tomorrow. That would leave him three points behind Burns and Loeb (assuming Loeb hangs on for the win). Petter Solberg can feel fortunate that Burns has also run into problems, as he won’t lose any ground to the championship leader.

Unless Loeb or Martin run into trouble tomorrow, we shouldn’t see much change in the leader’s table for the rally, with only roughly 90 kilometers of competitive driving left. Loeb has proven both he and the Xsara are fast enough to drive comfortably and maintain the lead over Martin.

The other car news….

We’ve got a new car! Well, not yet, we pick it up on Monday, but it’s a 2000 Subaru Outback Wagon. We went to a local dealer just to see what they had, and we loved the car, and after much haggling, we got a decent price for a trade-in on the Impreza. I’ll post photos as soon as we get it…

Posted on 4 October 2003