Motorsport: Citroen's Loeb reigns, Fords penalised

Monday motorsport reportApril 2, 2007

All of the Frenchman's victories have come in Citroens -- the three this year in the C4.

Triple world champion Loeb had already won in Monte Carlo and Mexico this season and took 11 of the 18 stages in Portugal.

Australia's Chris Atkinson crashed his Subaru out of the event on the second day of the event.

Just 700 metres from the start of a stage Atkinson missed a pace note while negotiating a sequence of sixth-gear corners and went off the course at high speed.

He and co-driver, fellow Australian Glenn Macneall, were uninjured but the Subaru was too badly damaged for them to continue.

"It's a great shame because I thought this rally would suit my driving style and the car, but it hasn't worked out that way," Atkinson says.

Loeb had a great battle in the revived Portugal event with his main rival, Finn Marcus Gronholm in a Ford Focus, who wound up 37 seconds behind him.

However, Gronholm was demoted from second to fourth after he was given a 5-minute penalty because the windows on his Ford Focus failed to pass a check.

Five other Ford Focus drivers suffered the same fate, including Gronholm's third-placed teammate and fellow Finn Mikko Hirvonen, who dropped back to fifth.

The penalties left Subaru's Petter Solberg 3 minutes 13.9 seconds behind Loeb in second, with Loeb's Spanish teamamte Dani Sordo taking a lucky third.

The rally organisers were fined $US50,000 (A$62,000) for an "inexcusable" lack of security, which resulted in five people being injured during last Thursday's practice when Portuguese driver Armindo Araujo's Mitsubishi Lancer crashed.

Next year's Rally of Portugal is already in doubt as a reslt.

The WRC now takes a month-long break until it resumes in Argentina on May 4.

Reigning champions Simon and Sue Evans won all 17 stages despite their Corolla sideswiping trees late in the event, run predominantly in the Imbil State Forest near Gympie.

Alongside them on the podium, in second place, were Simon's younger brother Eli and co-driver Chris Murphy after third in each of the two heats, while 18-year-old Victorian Brendan Reeves and his sister Rhiannon Smyth took third outright after fourth place in each heat.

The younger Evans and Reeves both drove privateer Subaru Impreza WRXs.

More familiar faces were second in each heat -- Subaru's main privateer, Dean Herridge, on Saturday, and Toyota triple national champion and operator of its factory team, Neal Bates, on Sunday in the first of its S2000 cars, albeit in last year's bodywork.

Bates and his long-time co-driver Coral Taylor were second on every stage Sunday after a fuel line problem cost them half an hour on Saturday.

"Other than a silly little problem in heat one, the S2000 car has actually been very reliable," Bates says.

The story wasn't so positive for the S2000 Ford Fiestas built by V8 Supercar star Jason Bright's Pirtek team.

Michael Guest ran as high as fourth on one early stage Saturday but time lost replacing an engine drive belt on the road dropped him to 11th in that heat and Sunday he retired with power steering failure.

Darren Windus lost his gearbox within 1km of starting the first stage but scored a relatively untroubled fifth place Sunday.

Herridge was on target for third place in heat 2 but his Subaru's engine failed on the second-last stage.

Victorious Evans joked that he had proved the Group N(P) Toyota not only fast and reliable again but "tree-proof as well" after surviving his excursion late Sunday.

"At least we got a good bounce off the tree and kept going," Evans says.

Wife Sue saw things a little differently.

"Once again Simon's managed to isolate all the damage on my side of the car," she says.

"It broke my window, so it meant that we ate dust for the remainder of the stage."

The Evans' still won that stage by more than eight seconds and Sunday's heat by 1 minute 11.5 seconds.

Saturday's margin had been an even more comfortable 1 minute 35 seconds.

Youngster Reeves is a recent graduate of an Australian Institute of Sport rally driver development program in Canberra.

Of his podium from 17th in the starting order, Reeves says: "It is a result I really didn't expect at all. We came into ARC this year just worried about getting to the finish of events and not at all worried about results or podiums. To be on the podium is just amazing."

Molly Taylor, only 18 too and the daughter of Coral Taylor, also had an exceptional ARC driving debut, winning the F16 and Rally Challenge categories in her two-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Mirage -- with P-plates prominently displayed as she finished ninth outright.

Defending Queensland rally champion Glenn Brinkman narrowly beat Steve Shepheard to fifth overall and the pair, both driving Mitsubishi lancers, finished equal winners of the Queensland Rally Championship round run as part of the event.

The ARC round is the Forest Rally in and near Busselton, Western Australia, on April 27-29.

And a dozen drivers with V8 Supercar experience will be on the grid.

The enduro is being run along with the Bathurst International Motor Festival at Mt Panorama from April 6-8. We'll take a closer look at it later in the week.

A formal submission is to be lodged in the coming weeks.

We'll take another look at this matter during the week too.

F1 to outlaw traction control again
Traction control will be outlawed again in Formula 1 from next year.

Standard on many road cars to reduce wheelspin and make them easier to handle in the wet, traction control systems were banned from F1 from the start of 1994 to try to put more emphasis in racing back on driver skill rather than technology.

By 2001 the authorities basically conceded they could not police the regulations and allowed traction control again.

The new ban from next season will coincide with the introduction of standard electronic control units.

"No car may be equipped with a system or device which is capable of preventing the driven wheels from spinning under power or of compensating for excessive throttle demand by the driver," the governing Federation Internationale de l'Automobile says.

"Any device or system which notifies the driver of the onset of wheel spin is not permitted."

Webber says a GP there could be "a real signature event", but it seems to be dawning on people that staging a night GP will be no easy thing.

"There's a few unanswered questions which need a bit more research, but that happens when you have something very exciting and something very new," Webber says.

"The question of whether it rains has been mentioned.

"It requires a lot of research and development into actually understanding how that could take place in terms of the amount of lighting required to make the event safe for the drivers, for marshals and (other) people taking part."

Despite the excitement in Singapore about the prospect of it joining the F1 calendar, there does not seem to be the same haste from Bernie Ecclestone's headquarters to sign off on a race there.

Wonder whether confirmation will come in the lead-up to this week's second round of the F1 world championship in neighboring Malaysia.

Fellow Australian David Brabham, sharing a Highcroft Racing-entered, Honda-derived Acura ARX-01 with Stefan Johansson, was third in the LMP2 class and fifth outright -- about 7.7 seconds behind Briscoe's Porsche.

Reigning series champions Allan McNish and Rinaldo Capello, winners eight times last season, led teammates Marco Werner and Emanuele Pirro home at the end of a race that got off to an action-packed beginning before a series of full-course yellow flags disrupted its second half.

Briscoe's co-driver Maassen beat German Timo Bernhard in another Penske Porsche by just 0.126 seconds in the final sprint to the flag.

The Porsches were about 25 seconds behind the Audis.

The Porsches shared the front row, with the Briscoe car the second fastest qualifier, but found themselves in the pits early and laps down.

The Briscoe/Maassen car had sucked up carbon fibre pieces from an opening-lap incident, clogging the air intake and causing the oil, coolant and brakes to run very hot.

Then Briscoe came together with the Andretti-Green Racing Acura of Marino Franchitti, brother of the better-known Dario, and the Australian was given a stop-and-go penalty.

The Porsche incurred yet another penalty when a crew member had goggles up during a pit stop.

"To score my first American Le Mans Series win overcoming all the problems that faced us at the beginning of the race made this victory very special," says Briscoe, who had Roger Penske calling the strategy on the radio throughout the race.

"I thought everyone would be very cautious and have a clean start on this street course, but the early green flag caused many of the competitors to head for the same patch of concrete, and there was not enough room for everyone.

"I don't know how we did it today. After the problems at the start it didn't look good. Apart from that we had a fast car, got some luck and went on to win."

Briscoe and Maassen, who is the defending LMP2 champion and now has 27 class win to his credit, finished eighth in the opening round two weeks earlier at Sebring, also in Florida, are now in contention for the championship and Porsche is tied for the manufacturers' lead with Acura with 39 points each.

Bernhard and his co-driver, Frenchman Romain Dumas, lead the LMP2 driver standings with 35 points each, three points ahead of Mexicans Adrian Fernandez and Luis Diaz, while Briscoe, Maassen, Brabham and Johansson have 29 points each -- one behind Bryan Herta.

Tomas Enge, the Czech driver implicated in a drug scandal in his Formula 3000 days, had a huge crash at St Petersburg but is reported to be in a satisfactory condition.

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