WRC Rally of France: Ogier hit by gearshift sensor problem

The Volkswagen team has changed both the sensor and the gearbox at lunchtime service.

Ogier dropped 8m26.1s through the morning loop, although four of those minutes came from a penalty after he checked into SS3 four minutes too early.

Ogier, who knew that victory and second place on the Powerstage would be enough for him to be crowned on the Rally of France for the second season in succession, said: "My rally is completely over now.

"All I can do is wait for the Powerstage and try to do something there, but that's a long wait."

Describing the problem that hit his Polo R WRC in SS2, Ogier said: "I had a spin in a slippery hairpin and then after that I was losing all of the power - I didn't know what was the problem.

"I stopped to change the connector, which was the problem I had last year in Greece, but it was not that.

"I continued and after some kilometres I began to understand how the problem was working.

"When I was shifting up [the gears] it was not working and we were losing the engine for a long time.

"Then I had to shift down aggressively to restart [the engine], but then we would lose the engine when we went back [on the throttle].

"We are much too far away now, it will be difficult to find the motivation now.

"The time penalty is from the other side of the car, you have to ask my co-driver - he is the master of the time.

"This is frustrating, it looked to be a nice rally with good conditions, it could have been a nice fight."

Ogier's co-driver Julien Ingrassia added: "When we came to the end of the [second] stage we were dealing with the problem and I added the wrong time."

SS2 was delayed by four minutes, with Ingrassia using the due time rather than the actual time - the actual time being four minutes later - to calculate his arrival at the start of the next stage.

Even if Jari-Matti Latvala, Ogier's only rival for the title, retires from the event, it is unlikely Ogier would be able to make up the seven minutes needed to get back into the top 10 to score the necessary points to take the title.