Rally Sweden: Sebastien Ogier leads into final day

Loeb had done his utmost to keep the pressure on Ogier during Saturday, and trimmed a few seconds from the Volkswagen's lead in the morning.

But Ogier responded in the afternoon, sharing the Sagen stage win with Loeb, and then setting the pace on the next two tests.

Loeb outpaced him by 1.1s on the short Hagfors Sprint, keeping the gap at 26.9 seconds with six stages to go.

The French duo have now left the rest of the field behind. Jari-Matti Latvala struggled with his VW on the second leg-two loop and lost third place to Mads Ostberg in the best of the Qatar M-Sport Fords. While Ostberg is 6.1s in front of Latvala, he trails Loeb by half a minute

Evgeny Novikov is taking it easy in a solitary fifth place. Fellow Qatar M-Sport man Juho Hanninen was edging away from team-mate Thierry Neuville until sliding into a snow bank on the Hagfors Sprint stage and losing sixth.

The recovering Dani Sordo is closing on ninth-placed Martin Prokop but will go into the final day still 35.8s adrift.

Leading positions after SS16:

Pos  Driver              Team/Car              Time/Gap
 1.  Sebastien Ogier     VW                  2h18m22.8s
 2.  Sebastien Loeb      Citroen                + 26.9s
 3.  Mads Ostberg        Qatar M-Sport Ford     + 57.7s
 4.  Jari-Matti Latvala  VW                   + 1m03.8s
 5.  Evgeny Novikov      Qatar M-Sport Ford   + 1m43.5s
 6.  Thierry Neuville    Qatar M-Sport Ford   + 3m16.2s
 7.  Juho Hanninen       Qatar M-Sport Ford   + 4m10.5s
 8.  Henning Solberg     M-Sport Ford         + 5m16.7s
 9.  Martin Prokop       Czech Ford           + 7m56.1s
10.  Dani Sordo          Citroen              + 8m31.9s