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Team points are Hirvonen’s top priority in Germany

“Third place will be a victory for me in this competition,” says Mikko Hirvonen during practice for the WRC rally in Germany. Hirvonen has driven in the competition three times and to date his best result is eighth.
 
The German rally is Ford’s first competition on asphalt with the new Focus. Hirvonen’s team mate, Marcus Grönholm, comes into the competition as leader of the drivers’ WRC series with a 13 point lead over the race favourite, Citroen’s Sebastien Loeb, who is aiming for his sixth successive win in Germany.
 
Hirvonen is in third place in the WRC series, five points behind Loeb.
 
“My main goal is to try and stay ahead of Citroen’s Daniel Sordo and to try and maximise the number of points for the team WRC series. It won’t be easy, even if my current car handled really well in the tests for the competition. It's clearly better on asphalt than the previous one, its really agile,” says Hirvonen.
 
The key location for the season’s ninth world championship rally is Trier, close to the border with Luxembourg. The route for the rally is concentrated in the Moselle wine growing area with its narrow but fast roads, where quick straight sections are often followed by nasty bends or series of bends.
 
The route also includes several faster roads and a section in Baumholder, a practice range for American tanks, where the roads are slippery, bumpy and somewhat nondescript.
 
“It’s not only the huge variations in the stages that have an impact on the character of the competition, but also the very changeable weather. The forecast is for unsettled weather during the rally, so we could do with a bit of luck in our choice of tyres. Rainy weather also calls for some guts,” says Hirvonen.
 
The rally, which starts on Friday, has 19 special stages and covers a total distance of 356.27 kilometres. Most of the rally’s stages are driven on Friday (128.60 kilometres) and on Saturday (164.86 kilometres), leaving only 62.81 kilometres for Sunday.