Gigi Galli fastest at Rally Italia Sardegna shakedown

Italian Gigi Galli was the fastest driver at today’s pre-event shakedown test for Rally Italia Sardegna.

Galli, who drives for the Stobart VK M-Sport Ford rally team, completed the 3.75km test stage in 3min 19.0sec - eight tenths of a second quicker than world champion Sebastien Loeb who was his closest rival.

But after the shakedown session Galli warned about drawing too many conclusions from his time.

“It’s nice to be fastest but we haven’t seen the true speed of the competition yet,” he explained. “Many of the top drivers were using shakedown just to check that their cars worked properly. I don’t think they were pushing too hard. But I haven’t done much testing here so I had some more work to do. My car feels good now though.”

Total Citroen’s Dani Sordo and Jari-Matti Latvala of the BP-Ford Abu Dhabi team tied the third fastest time.

World Championship leader Mikko Hirvonen was the only WRC driver to tackle the stage just once. His time of 3min 25.5sec was three tenths quicker than Loeb’s first effort, but after two days and 400km of testing in Sardinia last week the Finn reasoned there was little to be gained with more runs.

There were no major problems for the WRC crews but Per-Gunnar Andersson’s session was cut short by a transmission problem which left him with only three gears, while Subaru’s Chris Atkinson damaged the right-hand front suspension of his Subaru after hitting a rock.

Here are the best times of each of the WRC competitors:

1: Galli: 3m 19.0s
2: Loeb: 3m 19.8s
=3: Sordo: 3m 21.8s
=3: Latvala: 3m 21.8s
5: P. Solberg: 3m 22.9s
6: Hirvonen: 3m 25.5s
7: Atkinson: 3m 26.3
8: H. Solberg: 3m 26.4s
9: Gardemeister: 3m 27.4s
10: Wilson: 3m 28.5s
11: Aava: 3m 28.8s
12: Ostberg: 3m 29.3s
13: Al Qassimi: 3m 29.8s
14: Mikkelsen: 3m 30.3s
15: Rautenbach: 3m 30.5s
16: Andersson 3m 32.5s
17: Villagra: 3m 33.4s