SS14: Ogier: ‘I’m not pushing anymore'
Penalty threat hangs over Mikkelsen
Mikkelsen's heavy price for concentration lapse
Andreas Mikkelsen has blamed a momentary lapse of concentration for the crash on Saturday that dashed his hopes of a podium at Rally Guanajuato Mexico.
The Norwegian had closed to within a handful of seconds of snatching Dani Sordo's third place when he crashed out in this afternoon's repeated 42km Otates test.
The Norwegian was 4.5sec adrift of Sordo when his Volkswagen Polo R went off the road about 10km from the finish.
Neither Mikkelsen nor co-driver Anders Jaeger were hurt in the crash, which happened at the same corner where Robert Kubica planted his Ford Fiesta RS on its roof in 2014.
"I know the corner really well but I just realised the pacenote a bit too late," Mikkelsen told wrc.com. "We were pushing very hard because we were trying to catch Dani but I was not fully concentrated. I realised the note too late, hit a big stone and we slid off."
His car came to rest on a gravel ridge, next to the Mitsubishi Lancer of Mexican driver Jorge Gonzalez Hernandez, who went off at the same point in the morning.
"The other guys said hello to us when we arrived - they stopped there on the first pass," Mikkelsen explained. "The gravel underneath our car had left the wheels in the air so we were pretty stuck and also the front-right arm was gone so there wasn't much we could do."
