Gronholm confident of Birthday win

Gronholm now has just six stages - or 90.18 kilometres - to negotiate before he can claim his fourth Swedish Rally victory - and on his 38th birthday.

Although Loeb has vowed to keep on pushing, Gronholm feels comfortable with his new Ford Focus and believes that, provided there are no problems, he has the pace to take his second successive victory.

"There are many kilometres remaining and you can never have enough of a lead," Gronholm said. "But I will continue to drive normally tomorrow and so long as we do not encounter any problems, then everything should be OK.

"Everything has gone really well - the biggest problem I had is that the batteries have gone flat in my heated socks. I was slightly faster than Sebastien all day and that made me more relaxed. We made some small differential changes last night and the car handled really well as a result.

"The roads were a little rutted from the cars running in front of us and in some places there was snow on the road where they had smashed into the snowbanks.

"I stalled at the beginning of the penultimate stage and didn't really have a clean run but only dropped a couple of seconds to Sebastien."