Dani Sordo/Marc Martí and Sébastien Loeb/Daniel Elena returned to today’s closing service park in Villa Carlos Paz with their Citroën C4 WRCs sitting in 2ndand 3rd places respectively after completing just the Buenos Aires and Córdoba super-specials since Thursday evening’s start.
The organisers of the Argentine round had planned to kick off their event with aspecially laid-out spectator stage at the celebrated River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires, a decision which called for considerable logistical work to fly all the crews from Cordoba to the capital and back, with the rally cars following in a convoy of trucks. The outward journey passed off without a hitch, but the return trip was fraught by a cascade of problems which prevented the planes from taking off on time from Buenos Aires yesterday evening. The Citroën crews finally made it back to their hotel rooms at around 3am Friday morning. This delay initially led to the decision to cancel today’s opening loop of five stages (SS2-SS6) which had promised to be the most interesting part of Leg 1’s menu. However, appalling weather, including thick fog in Córdoba, then resulted in further delays to the flight on which all the rally officials and a certain number of Production category runners had been booked for the return from Buenos Aires. Their plane finally managed to take off from the capital at 1pm today which consequently led to the cancellation of the afternoon’s stages too. Only the Cordoba super-special, which was scheduled to conclude the day’s action, finally survived all these cuts.
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