Day 1pm: Gronholm flies

Gronholm had been running in fourth spot after the morning's first three runs behind team-mates Harri Rovanpera and Sebastien Lindhom, and Subaru's Petter Solberg. But trouble in front of him cleared the way elevating the Finn to the top of the order.

Solberg was the first to hit trouble. The Norwegian has been suffering from a bout of flu and seemingly lost concentration two kilometres into SS4. He had been running in third place overall just 13 seconds behind leader Rovanpera when he slid wise and spun off the road. The Subaru hit a rock as it fell into a ditch and damaged a steering rack component. It was enough to force him out of the rally, the second successive retirement for the reigning world champion.

"I was not concentrating fully, I guess because I am ill," he said. "I ran into a ditch, a bolt broke in the suspension and the driveshaft came out."

Just two stages later on SS6 and Rovanpera, who had taken four out of the five stages beforehand to build up a comfortable lead of 9.8s over Lindholm, rolled his Peugeot and lost 1m50s of time to his rivals. Lindholm incidentally only managed the fourth quickest time on the stage so instead of taking the overall lead from Rovanpera had it snatched away by Gronholm.

Clearly inspired, Gronholm went on to comfortably win the next three stages with seconds to spare over his rivals.

With Gronhom out in front, the most interesting battle of the afternoon was for third spot between Janne Tuohino in the second manufacturer point-scoring Ford and team-mate Markko Martin. It looked certain Martin would discard of Tuohino on SS9 after whittling down the Finn's advantage to just 1.5s after SS8, but Tuohino had other ideas and held the Estonian off in SS9, even though it was by just 1.2s.

After the final stage of the day though, Martin blew Tuohino away setting the fastest time of the 10th and final test to hold a comfortable 14s advantage over Tuohino.

Rally of Argentina winner Carlos Sainz (Citroen) is fifth overall just five seconds ahead of Jani Paasonen who has had an impressive first day in Finland in the Skoda Fabia.

Championship leader Sebastien Loeb, however, has been off the pace all day and only made it into a points-scoring position on the penultimate stage of the day. Following SS10 the Frenchman has moved up to seventh while Ford's Francois Duval rounds out the top eight.