Burns in charge but McRae pushing hard

Burns is seeking revenge for his controversial defeat in Argentina at the hands of team-mate Juha Kankkunen while McRae is out to fulfil his post-Safari Rally prediction of winning this rally.

'The car's good, the tyres are good and the driver's bloody good!' said Burns as he powered his Subaru into the lead of the event midway through Monday's stages.

And Burns believes he will have no trouble hanging on to the advantage during Tuesday's second leg.

'The car is so easy to drive in these conditions and no matter where we are on the road we can stretch our advantage.

'Tomorrow's stages are harder than today's and so our rivals will have to contend with far greater tyre wear trying to catch us. We're looking good.'

Burns' closest rival appeared to be Kankkunen in the other Subaru.

For a while the pair held first and second but the Finn slipped back when a tyre shed its tread.

'These things happen,' he reflected. 'It's the kind of event where anything can go wrong unexpectedly.'

McRae had a trouble free day in the Ford Focus and completed the final stage just over 18 seconds adrift of Burns.

'We've been driving flat out but there's a lot of loose gravel on the surface of the roads.
'Running third we were seeing a clean line emerging but we are still getting more wheelspin than we'd like. There's a real benefit in running further back.'

Burns will face that problem tomorrow unless he takes a time penalty before the first stage to run behind his rivals. On this form, however, he may not need that extra help.

The day saw several leading crews retire from the battleground including overnight leader Marcus Gronholm.

His Peugeot 206 was unable to continue after hitting a watersplash so hard that the clutch failed immediately afterwards.

Championship leader Didier Auriol broke his Toyota's suspension, McRae's team mate Thomas Radstrom was sidelined with a blown engine and Harri Rovanpera was lucky to escape unhurt when his SEAT cart-wheeled out of the event at over 120mph on the final stage of the day.

In the two-wheel drive 'Formula 2' category, Hyundai holds a convincing advantage over its rivals with Sweden's Kenneth Eriksson using his experience to edge ahead of Alister McRae during the day.

It is McRae's first visit to the event and, as co-driver David Senior said, 'Everything's new to us. We haven't even been here on holiday!'