SS7: Disaster for Loeb

Sebastien Loeb has tumbled out of the Rally Sweden top 10 after going off the road on stage seven of the event.

The reigning world champion went off at the second corner of the short Kirkener stage and his Citroen DS3 WRC was stuck for nearly two minutes.

Loeb had just closed to within 6.9 seconds of the rally lead by winning stage six, but his incident on the next test dropped him to 2m03.0s from the front in 11th place.

Rally leader Mikko Hirvonen was quickest on the stage, despite not enjoying its condition.

"It was okay, lots of gravel and now it’s starting to be very, very hard for the tyres," said the Citroen driver.

That result stretched his lead over Jari-Matti Latvala’s Ford to a still close 1.1s, with Latvala pleased with his performance on the stage even though he dropped a little time.

"I was not happy with how this stage went in the morning so I tried to improve and now I was quite happy - it was quite a good performance," said Latvala.

Loeb rejoined after his incident just ahead of Mads Ostberg’s Adapta Ford. The Norwegian was slightly irked to have to follow the champion through the stage but was still third quickest and is back up to third overall.

"Not so nice, he just got out in front of me," said Ostberg.

"We had the dust from him so it was not so easy. I took it steady. There’s nothing we can do with that.

"It’s not a long stage so it’s not too bad, just a little bit difficult to see some corners."

Ostberg is now 6.1s ahead of Petter Solberg, who took the first two stages of the afternoon carefully to save tyres for later after being concerned he was losing too many studs this morning.

Evgeny Novikov was an impressive third quickest in the M-Sport Ford, and with Dani Sordo having a brief spin in the MINI on the stage, the Russian is now just half a second behind the Spaniard.

Sebastien Ogier delivered his first giantkilling performance of the weekend on stage seven, going seventh quickest in his Volkswagen-run Super 2000 Skoda Fabia and moving up to 12th overall.