Superhuman Sebastien Loeb leapt further than ever into uncharted career territory when he celebrated his 50th World Rally Championship victory in Cyprus, 20 more than his nearest rival, Marcus Gronholm. On the first mixed surface World rally in 13 years the Frenchman also mastered a controversial single-tyre rule. Sebastien pulled out an early lead which stood him well later on, when he drove gravel stages in unfavourable conditions, as first car on the road. Changing conditions made the gravel roads tricky. Ford's number two driver Jari-Matti Latvala slid off the road for over 20 minutes, and two of the three Citroen Junior drivers retired after going off the road as well. Latvala's misfortune was a terrible blow for Ford's championship hopes but opened the chance for the privateer Xsara WRC of Petter Solberg to score the first non works podium for a driver in over three years.

Citroen came to the rally resplendent in a new colour schemes and revised corporate logos, and really looked exciting, but there were no technical developments either for them or their rivals at Ford. After an exciting but rather frustrating Rally Norway, Subaru's rallying exile Petter Solberg once again drove his black and silver eight-year old Xsara, looking visually dull in comparison, with the newer C4s, but his storming drive in the later stages of the event really brought a sense of fun to the occasion. After finding the challenge of the asphalt stages difficult to master on the Friday, Ford's Mikko Hirvonen drove as hard as he dared later in the event, bearing in mind he needed to have a top finishing position. Eventually he got ahead of Loeb's teammate Dani Sordo, who was then also passed by Petter Solberg, but in the end when Citroen scored 16 championship points from this event, where the odds had been strongly in favour of Ford, against 10 for BP Ford, the shock of Latvala's problem was evident.

In the battles between the subsidiary Citroen and Ford teams, Petter Solberg's remarkable third place stole the headlines but Matthew Wilson drove strongly to resist the challenge of Sebastien Ogier. The Frenchman had a mistake-ridden event which started during recce. He took the wrong turning down a stage driving about 5km with no pacenotes and then had to retrace his steps. It may be a slight consolation to Ogier that at an equivalent stage of his career, Sebastien Loeb took a wrong turning on a road section (Turkey 2003) and had to retire, having run out of fuel. On the event itself Ogier finally retired when he ended up off the road in the final stage. There were promising performances from both Evgeniy Novikov who on the second day was holding fifth place, and Conrad Rautenbach, who finished sixth. The Stobart VK M-Sport Ford team had an early disaster, when a local driver swung his vehicle into the path of the approaching Focus of Henning Solberg. Henning missed all the opening day's activities. Munchi's driver Federico Villagra had a consistent event to finish seventh, ahead of Khalid Al Qassimi, who was badly delayed by handbrake problems.

The Portuguese driver Armindo Araujo drove a measured rally in his Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX, leading the Production Car category from the start until the penultimate stage. He was consistently 15-30 seconds in front of the Skoda Super 2000 of Patrik Sandell, who resisted the temptation to pressure Araujo, but with one stage to go Araujo had gearbox troubles and this handed victory in the category to the Swedish driver. After earlier winning the PCWRC category in Norway, this was Sandell's second such victory of the season, an astonishing achievement for these cars which were only homologated less than three months earlier. Campedelli started well but then was struck with a series of rear differental problems giving the chance for the two new version Subarus of Nasser Al Attiyah and Toshi Arai to challenge for third place. Troubles struck both cars. The Qatari driver had the sort of overheating problems which he hoped the newly homologated modifications would have prevented, Arai struggled with a broken driveshaft, the Indian driver Gaurav Gill lost considerable time with brake failure and ultimately retired with electrical trouble.

This was the first occasion this year in which a world championship rally counted for both the PCWRC and the JWRC. Martin Prokop, registered in both categories elected to drive in the less well supported JWRC sector, where the only challengers were the Suzuki Sport Europe drivers Aaron Burkart and Michal Koscuiszko. This was truly an event the Japanese team will want to forget. The German driver Burkart punctured twice in the first day and lost a lot of time, while the Polish driver also lost time with a flat tyre. The JWRC cars were allowed to use racing rather than gravel tyres on the asphalt stages, but this was far from an ideal decision. They suffered serious tyre wear problems generally, largely on account of extensive corner-cutting by the four-wheel drive cars which liberally covered the special stages with stone.

The revolutionary decision to force four-wheel drive cars to run gravel tyres on the asphalt stages proved a success. Pirelli's rally tyre manager Mario Isola said: "The tyres performed very well, but obviously the level of performance was lower than tarmac tyres on tarmac. On the matter of tyre wear, consistency and integrity of the tyre we did not have any problems, it was all a successful experiment. We don't want to encourage this concept, but this was a very special situation. We tried to find a solution that was good for manufacturer, acceptable for the FIA and the organisers, and which did not change the character of the rally. I think mixed surface rallying is interesting, something coming back from the past but we prefer to have the right tyre on the right surface. We think there were no tyre failures on the four-wheel drive cars, maybe just one puncture all day. We had more problems with the Juniors who were allowed to use tarmac tyres, because the tarmac stages were littered by sharp stones. Tarmac tyres are less stiff and not so reinforced. I am happy with the way things went generally, however."

3mmm
foto 1: Citroen C4 WRC with a new look
foto 2: Strong words between Wilosn and Latvala
foto 3: Henning's Ford after the accident