The weekend had begun in disastrous fashion for the Swede. He suffered a puncture on the opening loop of the rally and dropped to tenth in WRC2, more than a minute adrift of the class leader.
From there, however, Solberg launched a remarkable comeback.
On Friday he reeled off five consecutive stage wins in his category. On Saturday he was even more dominant: seven stage wins in a row, clawing his way from almost a minute behind into second place in WRC2 and firmly back in the fight for victory.
The scale of his Saturday performance was underlined by the numbers: he was 34.6 seconds quicker than Estonian Robert Virves – the class leader – across the day’s stages, while fellow WRC2 title contender Yohan Rossel lost 54 seconds to the flying Swede.
“I didn’t expect to take so much time back in the afternoon, because I had two spares and the others had one spare,” Solberg told RallyJournal.com.
On his own performance he could only smile.
“Perfect. There’s not much more to say.”
“We knew it wouldn’t be easy to make this time back – it’s never easy on such fast roads. Fortunately for us there were some more twisty sections with more corners, and these were the places where we worked really hard and pushed to make the time back,” Solberg explained.
Rally Paraguay concludes on Sunday with four special stages totalling nearly 80 kilometres. Driving a Toyota for the Printsport team, Solberg sits just 6.5 seconds behind leader Virves, with Rossel chasing behind.
“The main goal is to stay ahead of Rossel. I don’t feel too much panic to fight for the victory,” Solberg added.
