Gronholm cruises to Greece win

The Ford driver was unchallenged throughout the second half of the event, and he was able to control his pace on the final day of the rally to make sure that he maintained his advantage over the reigning world champion, who finished second for Citroen.

"It has been OK," he said. "I was not pushing, I just had to finish. We followed Sebastien's pace today."

Loeb took a comfortable second place as Petter Solberg's challenge weakened as the rally went on.

However, the 2003 champion was happy to finish on the podium, after a weekend where both Subarus have shown that they have genuine pace.

"Now it's party time," said Solberg. "We tried to slow down to the finish. There was a serious gap to Sebastien, but we are happy with a podium."

Mikko Hirvonen had to settle for fourth place after the Finn lost ground on Saturday due to a broken windscreen, while Henning Solberg made sure that there were three Fords in the top five.

Chris Atkinson had led the rally briefly on Friday, but the Australian driver suffered several punctures throughout the weekend and he had fallen out of contention for a top result when he suffered serious damage to the front of his car on Saturday.

The second Subaru came home in the points with a sixth place finish, though, ahead of Jan Kopecky, who took advantage of other drivers' problems to get up to seventh.

Manfred Stohl had made it clear before the rally that he would try to stay out of trouble to score points, but his rally was not without drama, and he was only able to score a single point with eighth place.

Guy Wilks won the battle of the British drivers, as he took his Ford Focus to ninth place, 46 seconds ahead of Matthew Wilson.

Final top 10 positions:

Pos  Driver     Make       Time
 1.  Gronholm   Ford       3h49:22.6
 2.  Loeb       Citroen         38.6
 3.  Solberg    Subaru     +  1:34.1
 4.  Hirvonen   Ford       +  2:41.3
 5.  Solberg    Ford       +  4:52.7
 6.  Atkinson   Subaru     +  6:31.7
 7.  Kopecky    Skoda      +  8:15.8
 8.  Stohl      Citroen    +  8:56.2
 9.  Wilks      Ford       +  9:53.2
10.  Wilson     Ford       + 10:39.6