Loeb lets lead slip

World championship leader Sebastien Loeb threw away his advantage in the Rally of Turkey today with a calamitous stage nine.

The Frenchman held a slender overnight lead from Peugeot’s Marcus Gronholm and pulled clearer this morning with a win on stage eight, leaving his advantage at over 16 seconds.

But that gap was wiped out on the following stage, with Loeb incurring a 10-second penalty for a jump start before a lacklustre drive lost him a further 13 seconds on Gronholm, who won the stage.

Gronholm now heads into the final eight stages of the rally with a 6.9-second lead from Loeb’s Citroen, with third-place man Petter Solberg unlikely to figure in the victory battle.

The Norwegian is still suffering from the time he lost yesterday due to an engine problem on his Subaru and is almost a minute behind Gronholm.

Francois Duval clocked two fast times today in his Ford to move ahead of Citroen’s Carlos Sainz and into fourth place, with the veteran Spaniard now being chased by the sixth-placed Peugeot of Harri Rovanpera.

In the junior class, Darlington’s Guy Wilks is back in the rally after a dramatic finish to day one.

The Suzuki driver crashed on last night’s short super special stage, losing three minutes and dropping out of the victory hunt. His cause was not helped by a two-minute penalty for being late to a checkpoint this morning.

Wilks, who won last time out in Greece and is challenging for the title, is seventh, over five minutes down on class leader Mirco Baldacci.