Ostberg back after Friday roll

Mads Ostberg has rejoined today’s competition on Rally Italia Sardegna after a terrifying crash in his Ford Fiesta RS late last night.

The Norwegian, who was fourth, was tackling Friday final stage in darkness when he went off the road, his car coming to rest on its roof in a rock-filled ditch.

Despite the significant damage, mechanics at Ostberg’s Qatar M-Sport team that built the car originally were able to restore it to full health overnight, as team boss Malcolm Wilson explained:

“We need to get the onboard to see exactly what happened, but Mads said the car locked-up under braking for a left-hand corner and went straight off the road. There weren’t many rolls but the car landed on its roof. The worrying thing was that it landed between rocks and Mads and Jonas [Andersson, co-driver] struggled to get out, which was concerning for the crews at the time.

“The car arrived back in service at about 1am and we could see that the big issue was damage to the roll cage. Under normal circumstances you can’t continue if this happens but the team brings a complete roll cage just in case, and we were able to replace the section in front the windscreen which had taken the hardest impact.

“Normally we would have had to get the car back into parc ferme by 3am, but the FIA granted us a couple of extra hours due to the late finish here. The whole job took about three hours and now Mads is out again and hopefully able to keep up our record of points-scoring finishes.”