Can Sordo bring a bit of luck to Ford?

Cockermouth, watch out: the meteor's coming. It must be. With the run of luck Malcolm Wilson is having, odds of 182,138,880,000,000-to-1 for a direct hit from debris from outer space must be a serious concern.

Actually, the bigger fear from the sky in the Wilson household must be snow. They are themselves no strangers to skiing accidents. And Malcolm's son Matthew ruled himself out of four rounds of this year's World Rally Championship while training when the white stuff started falling. And then there's the 1993 Swedish Rally.

With snow on the ground, Wilson senior was leading the second round of the World Rally Championship until he went off the road on a fast left-hander having misheard a pacenote call.

And now this: Jari-Matti Latvala injures himself in a skiing accident.

And, by all accounts, it sounds like a fairly lame shunt at best. It's not like Latvala misjudged his landing from a cliff jump, caught an edge in the steepest of couloirs or just missed out on nailing a backflip mute grab in the park.

No, Latvala reportedly fell off a lift while cross-country skiing. Now that really is pretty bad luck.

And, next week, it's likely to get worse for the luckless, but immensely likeable, Finn.

Already 38 points adrift of the lead in the World Rally Championship, by Sunday afternoon in South America, that difference could have risen to 66 if Sebastien Loeb celebrates success on the event and Powerstage in Villa Carlos Paz.

The good news for Latvala is that Loeb hasn't taken every one of Citroen's seven Rally Argentina victories. Just the past six.

If part two of Ford's nightmare does play out in the fashion outlined above, surely the time will come for Wilson and Ford's blue army to rally around Petter Solberg; the Norwegian arrives in Argentina just four points short of Loeb's lead.

Sordo had his first Ford test this week

I feel hugely sorry for Latvala and you can only imagine the agony he's going through watching the rest of his world depart for the other side of the Atlantic while he recuperates at home. I remain convinced that Latvala is the fastest rally driver around. He's also a deep-thinking and sensitive fella who does his utmost to please everybody and takes failure to heart, where other drivers would simply brush it aside as a disappointing by-product of what they're being asked to do.

In many ways, the worst part about all of this is the thinking time it's going to provide Latvala with.

Jari-Matti: forget what's happened and move on. You have to. You have the ability to be a world champion if you follow these three simple steps: avoid the rocks towards which your inside-front wheel appears to be laser-guided; stop overthinking the thing and learn to leave the lift safely.

Latvala's latest misfortune has handed an incredible opportunity to Dani Sordo, who will drive the Finn's Fiesta WRC next weekend. When I first heard of rumours linking the Spaniard with the Ford, I couldn't help but smile as Sordo appeared to have sailed, once again, under a lucky star.

Having spent five years in the world championship-winning car without winning a single rally, Sordo has now found his way into the plum seat again. How does he do it?

Then I looked a little closer and saw how much Sordo has matured since leaving Citroen and, quite frankly, how much faster he is now.

Three podiums from five rallies speak for themselves, but it was his pace in Portugal that really caught the eye. All too often when he was working with Citroen, a Superallying Sordo would be nowhere on Saturday and Sunday. Not in Portugal. He was fired-up, motivated and very, very fast in some of the most treacherous conditions imaginable. Granted, he'd got a quick car beneath him in the new evolution of the Mini WRC, but at the same time there was a feeling that this really is a new evolution of Sordo as well.

My first thought for the Latvala seat would have been Mads Ostberg. It's hard to imagine a more worthy cause right now, but the Rally of Portugal winner was ruled out by entry regulations that wouldn't permit a switch to the factory squad.

Sordo is a faster driver than when he was Loeb's team-mate last decade © LAT

But, as well as that, there's the experience thing. Ostberg might have won more rallies than Sordo (1-0), but the Spaniard has started more than double the number of WRC rounds that the Norwegian has. And, more specifically, he has five times the experience Ostberg garnered from a sole start on Rally Argentina.

And experience will count as much as anything next week. Depending on the conditions, Rally Argentina can be one of the toughest rounds of the championship.

Who could ever forget the rains of 2008? The weather that washed out those stages made the conditions on Rally of Portugal look like a light shower.

And the roads deliver a real mixture as well, from the flowing fast stages south of Carlos Paz, to the unbelievable technical and twisty tracks treading the foothills of the Andes.

These kind of roads need somebody who knows how to bring a car to the finish - and that's Sordo. Of his 93 starts, he has only failed to see Sunday afternoon on 12 occassions.

As you read this, Sordo and his co-driver Carlos del Barrio are pounding the test Fiesta through Greystoke, force-feeding themselves information on how the car works. Given that Sordo's full-time employer Prodrive is engaged in developing an increasingly stern challenge to the Fiesta RS WRC, it might come as a surprise to see a rival driver being given relatively open access to Christian Loriaux's usually top-secret box of tricks. But who's to say Loriaux can't learn a thing or two from Sordo and the Prodrive way.

And this sort of driver switch isn't exactly unprecedented. In 1986, Ford allowed Stig Blomqvist to take the wheel of a Peugeot 205 T16E2 in Argentina and Finland, before returning to the RS200 for the final Group B blast in Britain.

Whatever the reason, Sordo's arrival as Solberg's team-mate has added yet another twist to what is one of the most eagerly awaited rounds of the championship.

Latvala is desperate to get back to action after his skiing accident © LAT

Argentina is always a classic, with more than a million people lining the roads, but this year it'll be even more special with its longer-than-usual endurance route. Three hours after an 0430 alarm call next Friday, the crews will find themselves on the startline of the 23-mile La Pampa stage. That done, there's a mile or two of road section for breath to be caught before Ascochinga and 32 more flat-out miles. And that's all before mid-morning on day one.

It may not be to everybody's taste or pocket, but there's no denying round five of the WRC is going to be a toughie.

And Sunday's final day could be the toughest of them all. As the roads climb well past the 2000-metre mark in the late southern hemisphere autumn, it's not unusual to see snow on the stages.

Best not mention that last bit to Wilson...