We’ll struggle to do much on this event, admits Ford boss

After two Citroen-dominated stages in Bulgaria this morning, Ford’s rally team boss Malcolm Wilson has admitted his drivers are unlikely to trouble the rally leaders this weekend.

With 59 of the rally’s 354 competitive kilometres completed, Citroen C4s led by defending champion Sebastien Loeb, occupy the top five places. BP Ford Abu Dhabi team drivers Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala hold sixth and seventh places respectively, 41sec and 46sec off the lead.

After an intensive period of asphalt testing during the summer break, which concluded last week with a 1,000km test, Wilson said he was disappointed to be so far off the pace.

"It’s not very good," he acknowledged. "On the first stage we felt the drivers were finding their feet, it wasn’t too bad, but on the really fast section on the second stage [between 1km and 10km] we lost a lot of time - which would probably point to power. We’ve been looking [at data] and when there’s a technical section then the pace of both Mikko and Jari is much better. Okay, not as fast as Loeb, but certainly on the likes of Petter and Ogier.

"I think we’ll be struggling to do anything on the event, to be honest," continued Wilson. "It’s not where we want to be, that’s for sure. We’ve done a lot of work and we felt that we’d made some progress, but we’ve come here and the reality is we’re not where we want to be. It’s not what we were expecting. We always knew it was going to be difficult to beat Sebastien but we had hoped to be able to put in the odd good competitive time and be challenging for the podium. But at the minute it’s not looking like that.

"Okay, there are a few changes we can make but, to be honest I don’t think we can change enough here that’s going to put us anywhere near Sebastien’s pace."