Mr. unstoppable, Sebastien Loeb, has done it again. Winning the final round of the WRC calendar in England last month, the Frenchmen claimed his eighth win, and ended the season by being crowned World Champion for the seventh time.

Trailing him by 4.8 seconds going into the final day, Petter Solberg couldn’t match his pace, and Loeb extended his lead to 19.1 seconds by the end of the day. With a second place finish, Solberg would have liked to have kept his hopes alive to claim the runners-up place in the Championship race, but lost out to Jari-Matti Latvala by just 2 points. Matti started Sunday’s leg behind team-mate Mikko Hirvonen only to register a third place finish as Mikko lost out by committing a few mistakes in the slippery conditions in the first Margam Park Stage to hand over his position.

Dani Sordo and Hennin Solberg completed the top six positions, despite Hennin having a front brake problem at the start of the day, which was finally rectified in the mid-morning service – enabling the Ford driver to complete the rally without any further hindrance. Competing on his home turf, Mathew Wilson put in an impressive performance as the Brit managed to finish seventh overall.

Luck just doesn’t want to favour Kimi Raikkonen, as the 2007 Formula One World Champion encountered gearshift problems – forcing him to shift to manual transmission on stage 18. However, this problem did not deter the Citroen Junior Team driver from claiming 8th place overall. Finishing behind Kimi, Ostberg did well despite an instrument warning light that kept flashing on his Subaru Impreza’s dashboard on the penultimate stage. He was followed by Andreas Mikkelsen who completed the top ten finishes in the rally.

The best of the best

Born on 26th of February 1974, Sebastien Loeb is widely regarded as the most successful rally driver to date. This is due to the fact that the Frenchmen holds the record of winning the Championship title for seven consecutive years, which is a statistic that’s simply hard to get your head around. Apart from this, the Citroen lead driver also holds the record for the maximum wins (62) in a competitive series.

Initially a gymnast by profession, Sebastien moved to rallying in the year 1995, only to win his first Junior World Rally Championship title in 2001. The following year, he was signed on by the Citroen factory team to compete in the 2002 season, where, along with co-driver Daniel Elena, he grabbed his debut WRC win by standing atop the podium in Rallye Deutschland the same season. In 2003, locked in a head-to-head battle with Petter Solberg, the Citroen driver lost out on the Championship by just a single point. The following year, he clinched the title with ease, and hasn’t looked back since.