Wales Rally GB : Three questions to Sébastien Loeb

Almost three months elapsed between your victories in Finland and Spain. Did your sixty-seventh win come as a relief?

“That’s one way of putting it! Winning Rally Spain wasn’t all that obvious and I really had to fight hard in the first two legs. The third day was particularly stressful as we had to make the right tyre choice in unstable weather conditions. I really needed that victory to tackle the last event of the season in the best conditions. But there’s no sense in getting carried away, I’ve still got a long way to go to win the world championship.”

You’re up against Mikko Hirvonen again. What do you fear about him?

« Mikko’s very strong mentally speaking in these kinds of situations. Above all, don’t underestimate him. He’s dominated some rallies head and shoulders. At the mid-season mark he said he didn’t believe in his chances of winning the title. But the way the recent rallies have panned out have put him back in the running. In some ways, he really hasn’t got anything to lose and he’s going to seize his chances. Being second holds no interest for him. He’s going to push right from the start to go for victory. He’s certainly going to set the pace in the race.”

You’ve won the last three rallies in Great Britain. How are you going to tackle this event whose route has been considerably revised compared to the one you know?

“I don’t yet have a really clear idea of what awaits us, but it’ll obviously make things a bit more complicated. The new stages will require increased concentration during reconnaissance and more work on the on-board camera videos. We’re more at the mercy of a trap than in a stage we’ve known for ten years. That’s really the ever-present threat we have to cope with in this rally: I may have won it three times but it was always hanging by a thread at one moment or another. I’ll do two days’ practice in Wales the previous weekend to fine-tune my preparation for this event. This will help me to be in tip-top form.”