Corsica 2003The Tour de Corse 2003 was an emotional rollercoaster for the Subaru World Rally Team. It started in the worst possible way - with Petter crashing heavily on the shakedown stage. His car slid off the road and into a telegraph pole, kinking the shell. Most teams would have decided that Petter`s rally was over before it had even started.
But Subaru were determined not to be beaten. The mechanics worked through the night to get the car repaired for the start. Team principal David Lapworth said: "I`ve never seen anything like it. Here we were, in some back street garage in Ajaccio in the middle of the night, attacking the car with hammers, chains and whatever we could find to get it sorted." At 4am Petter`s chief engineer Pierre Genon took the re-shaped Impreza out for a test drive and pronounced it healthy. The bleary-eyed mechanics prepared it for the start, just a handful of hours away.
Initially, the battle for the lead was between Citroen`s Sebastien Loeb and the Ford of Markko Martin, while Petter opted for a cautious start. But as the rain fell on the second day, both Loeb and Martin put themselves out of contention in separate incidents on SS8.
Ford`s Francois Duval inherited the lead, but Petter`s confidence was growing in the increasingly wet conditions. On the final stage of the second day, the Norwegian set his third consecutive fastest time (by a staggering 17.9 seconds) to take the lead - a feat that had seemed impossible less than 48 hours earlier! In the end, it was just a question of Petter controlling his advantage. He took an emotional victory by more than half a minute.
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subaru,
france,
tour-de-corse,
corsica,
impreza,
