Mikko Hirvonen has to win Rally Japan if he wants to stand any chance at all of depriving Sebastien Loeb of the drivers' World Rally Championship this year, and he has started the 14th round of the series in the best possible way by pulling out a significant advantage. In his Pirelli Scorpion -equipped Ford Focus WRC, Hirvonen leads the sister car of Jari-Matti Latvala and Loeb's Citroen C4 WRC - who is now half a minute behind.
 
"We found a good rhythm straight away," explained Jarmo Lehtinen, the co-driver of the leading Ford. "However maintaining it all day was far from easy. At various points the snow and mud made the surfaces extremely slippery. The soft-compound Scorpion tyres on our Ford Focus did their job well, giving us good grip despite several places where the road conditions were marginal. We've got a small advantage over Sebastien now, but it's still a long way off being safe."

The day also witnessed the retirement of the Ford Focus WRC- Pirelli of Francois Duval, who went off the road whilst holding an excellent second place overall. Turbo problems also held back the second factory Citroen of Dani Sordo. These misfortunes allowed Petter Solberg and Chris Atkinson to provisionally climb to fourth and fifth places at the wheel of their Scorpion -equipped factory Subaru Impreza WRCs.

The Production car World Rally Championship category (for Group N and Super 2000 cars), which is also exclusively supplied by Pirelli , is currently led by Evgeny Novikov driving a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo.

Following the two Mediterranean asphalt rounds in Spain and Corsica, the World Rally Championship heads for the Far East and the penultimate round of the series, Rally Japan. The event will as always take place on the island of Hokkaido but now it moves from Obihiro (where the rally was based for the first four years of its existence) to Sapporo: the host city of the Olympics in 1972 and a venue for the World Cup 30 years later. For the first time in the history of the World Rally Championship, a spectator superspecial will be run within an entirely covered stadium, with two cars competing alongside each other. 

The special stages used this year are completely new, and as was the case in Finland two months ago - and will equally be the case in Wales in December - the drivers competing in the World Rally Championship and Production car World Rally Championship (PWRC) will use the soft-compound Pirelli Scorpion tyres. According to rules set down by the FIA, world motor sport's governing body, competitors will not be allowed to make cuts in any of the Pirelli tyres used on this 14th round of the 2008 World Rally Championship.

The 2008 Rally Japan is likely to have a decisive impact on the championship, as the new champions in both the drivers' and manufacturers' series could already be crowned on Sunday night in Sapporo. So far, Loeb-Elena and Citroen have the upper hand over Hirvonen-Lehtinen and the factory Ford team. Ford however has no intention of giving up, having recently carried out some testing in the south of France with Hirvonen and Latvala to further improve the Focus WRC08 on gravel.

Terenzio Testoni, Pirelli's chief technician on the World Rally Championship, commented: "I'm sure that this new event around Sapporo will be a very interesting one. I've been able to drive some of the stages and I found them to be truly challenging. The gravel roads tackled by the World Championship protagonists are medium to fast forest tracks, which will lead to some quite high average speeds. But with the rain that is likely to be present during the event, I think the crews will mostly be concentrating on avoiding mistakes under braking or through the corners, which could have costly consequences or cause some crews to get stuck."