Solberg happy with first points of the season
After following home Marcus Gronholm in the first and second rally of the season, Sebastien Loeb took a commanding win on Sunday in Mexico to move five points clear at the head of the championship in his Kronos Citroen.
Loeb faced stiff competition from Petter Solberg until the final day of the rally until the Subaru driver suffered with a power steering problem.

"It was close," the 2005 Champion stated. "Petter lost 30 seconds with his problem yesterday, but I lost 30 seconds on day one when I was cleaning the road. It was a good fight, really interesting. Then I had a more comfortable lead for today and it was easier for me to finish the rally in this position. We had some very good moments on this rally. The car was perfect; we had no problems all weekend."

Solberg remained in contention for the rally win until his steering problem intervened.

"We were flat out," he explained. "We tried to get some time from Loeb, on the last split we were five seconds ahead. We came downhill, very sideways into a corner. I hit a rock a little bit and then lost the power steering. I said I broke it, but the engineers tell me from the data it was a leak from one of the pipes; it happened before I hit the rock. It was very unlucky, we pushed very hard so we wouldn`t lose too much more than 22 seconds. I didn`t think I could win, not really after the Super Special. We tried hard from the start this morning, it came up to minus one but when there was still a long way to go, it was difficult."

While disappointed in not being able to challenge for the victory, Solberg at least got his campaign firmly underway after failing to score in the opening two rounds of the championship.

"To have zero points is not very cool, is it? With everything that happened it`s been quite difficult," Solberg said. "I`m very happy with second, unfortunately we could have had a great battle, but we had a boring day. We want more points. If we can come a little closer now, then we can take more risks, but points are the important thing now."

Solberg will be testing the latest Pirelli tarmac tyres this week ahead of the next two rounds of the World Rally Championship.

Tags: rally,