NICOSIA, Cyprus -- Frenchman Sebastien Loeb
earned his 50th victory in the World Rally Championship on
Sunday by a comfortable margin.
Loeb, in a Citroen, won by 27.2 seconds over Mikko Hirvonen
in a Ford Focus after the Finn narrowed Saturday's 49.8-second
gap in three gravel stages through the Troodos mountains.
Norway's Petter Solberg, in a Citroen Xsara, was third.
"I'm very happy with what I've achieved, but I'm not finished
yet. Next I'm going for 51," said Loeb, who won a record fifth
world title last season.
Co-driver Daniel Elena said: "It feels really nice. Now the
important thing is to try and get all 12 wins this year."
Loeb and Elena won the opening two stages of this year's
12-country circuit in Ireland and Norway and led the Cyprus
Rally from Friday's start.
Hirvonen said the weather had not helped him.
"If it were
drier the result might have been different but that's how it is," he said. "We were faster today, though. Hopefully we can take that speed
to Portugal."
Solberg became the first private entrant to make a WRC
podium since Toni Gardemeister on the 2005 Monte Carlo rally.
He edged Dani Sordo in a Citroen C4 in the penultimate
stage on Sunday, in spite of earlier gear selection problems
while trying to navigate a hairpin bend in fourth.
The former Subaru driver, world champion in 2003, was left
out in the cold when the Japanese manufacturer quit the WRC late
last year, and he decided to put together his own rally team.
"I know this is an old car, and maybe Citroen would like to
finish ahead, but they should be proud of how good the Xsara
still is," Solberg said.
Cyprus is the only mixed-surface event in the WRC calendar, and recent rain turned normally hard-packed tracks into muddy
trails.
"It was really muddy in there and we ran out of windscreen
washer fluid, so we had trouble seeing," said Briton Matthew
Wilson in a Ford Focus, who was fifth.
The next leg of the WRC, the Rally of Portugal, runs from
April 2 to 5.