SS2: Ostberg blasts to the front

Mads Ostberg moved into the lead of Rally Sweden as he shared the fastest time on stage two with Jari-Matti Latvala.

A repeat of last year’s Sweden battle between Ostberg’s independent Ford and a works Fiesta driver already appears to be brewing, as Ostberg and Latvala set equal best times of 14m13.0s on Mitandersfors.

"It was a good stage for us," said Ostberg. "I took it very steady in many places but I think that’s what paid off really.

"It was a clean stage for me, not a big push, just very confident through the stgae. I’m not pushing, we’ll just stay on this speed and see how it goes."

That performance gave Ostberg an early 1.9-second lead over Latvala, who is just 0.1s ahead of his former Ford team-mate - and double Sweden winner - Mikko Hirvonen. The factory Citroen driver was third quickest on the stage, and felt there was a lot more to come as his confidence in the car on snow builds.

Petter Solberg thoroughly enjoyed himself on the stage that passes his house, and felt that being only fifth fastest was largely due to others having better road positions.

"It was a fantastic stage, fantastic," said Ford driver Solberg. "I think people behind will be getting much cleaner roads all the time but I’m very happy with my stage and hello to all the people on the farm!"

World champion Sebastien Loeb pipped Solberg to the fourth fastest time, but is only sixth in the overall order behind super special winner Dani Sordo’s MINI. Loeb took a 10s penalty first thing this morning for being a minute late out of service.

"It took a little bit too much time to change something on the car so we had this penalty," Loeb explained.

"We decided to put two spare wheels in and it took some time to adjust everything for that."

Ott Tanak’s M-Sport Ford was third quickest on last night’s super special but went off early on today’s opener and lost an enormous 25 minutes getting his car out of the snow.

There was also early disappointment for Team Portugal MINI driver Paulo Nobre, who spun and got stuck in a snow bank early on the stage. The popular Brazilian pulled up and stopped shortly afterwards.