Sebastien Ogier has revealed that it was a mistake in his pace notes which caused him to roll while leading Rally Argentina this morning.
Ogier started the day 43 seconds ahead, but rolled close to the end of the Ascochinga test. The resultant power steering failure dropped him to third place at the finish.
"I had quite a comfortable lead for today and it seemed as though it would be easy to get the victory, but finally we lost it," said the Citroen driver. "The reason was a wrong pace note near the end of stage. We had 'cut' in the notes and finally, in this corner, there was no cut. I hit a small thing, we had a small roll, it was quite slow, but the power steering was broken. I thought it would be hard to finish the rally and impossible to conserve the lead."
Ogier denied he was under pressure and pushing too hard.
"There was no pressure, we had a good rhythm in this stage, we had lost some time [early in the stage] to Seb [Loeb] and Mikko [Hirvonen], but it was OK," he said. "We had gone past the difficult place with the fog, but the place where we rolled was actually easy.
"I had something wrong in my notes. When I arrived in the corner I hesitated and didn't take the right solution. It's a bit stupid, but it's rallying. I'm not happy for sure about this, but it's still a good weekend for Citroen."
Loeb won the event from Hirvonen, expanding the champion's lead at the top of the table to 13 points.