WRC: Ogier celebrates perfect win

Sébastien Ogier can celebrate victory for the first time in his WRC career after wrapping up a stunning maiden win on Rally Portugal. 

Ogier took the lead of the event on the opening day as he benefited from running down the starting order to move to the head of the field, but then showed his pace through day two as he maintained his advantage despite sweeping the road for the cars behind.

The Citroen Junior Team driver started day three with a lead of 21.1s over Sébastien Loeb but minimised his losses through the four main stages to lead into the final run through the Algarve Stadium Super Special stage, which he completed without problems to secure victory over Loeb by 7.9s – beating the champion on outright speed to join the list of WRC winners.

“A few weeks ago it was a big disappointment for me not to win,” he said, referring to his late error on the final stage in New Zealand that handed victory to Jari-Matti Latvala, “but I knew it was a great performance and a great weekend. This weekend was just perfect. We pushed very hard from the start to the last day and I have my first victory. To get this against Sébastien is very good. He is the best driver in rally and the best in history; he is the reference for everybody.

“It’s thanks to Citroen that I’m here today. The second half of last season, we progressed rally after rally – it’s almost perfect. Now we have the win and now we have to progress on tarmac where we don’t have a lot of experience. My next goal is to progress on tarmac.”

Arguably the biggest praise for Ogier came from countryman Loeb, who admitted during the Sunday run through that stages that Ogier was at times ‘uncatchable’.

“He was really strong all the weekend, especially on the second pass he was very, very fast,” Loeb said at the end. “We couldn’t make any difference today in the afternoon. Maybe I was not fast enough the first day; I was thinking to the mistake in New Zealand and didn’t want the same risk – I was waiting a bit that it happens. Finally, we lost a bit of time and we couldn’t catch it again.

"He showed me here he is faster than anybody else in the Championship. We couldn’t do anything. It was the quickest driver who won today.”