Villagra matches his Mexican best on WRC return

Five months after its last competitive outing, the Munchi’s Ford World Rally Team marked its return to the FIA World Rally Championship with a points-scoring result in Rally Mexico.

Federico Villagra and co-driver Jorge Perez Companc brought their Ford Focus RS WRC to the finish in seventh place overall to take eight manufacturers' points.

The result equalled the Argentine duo’s result in Rally Mexico 2008 and got their eight-round 2010 WRC campaign off to a solid start.

On Friday’s opening day Villagra eased himself back into action in his first WRC round since Rally de Espana in 2009. And although he was affected by brake problems on Saturday, the multiple retirements on that day's opening stage helped Villagra to make progress up the leaderboard.

Starting Sunday's final day seventh overall, with big time gaps ahead and behind, Villagra made the most of the opportunity to test and prepare for the rest of the season.

“Seventh place on the first rally of the season is good and keeps us on plan," said Villagra. "It was a very hard rally with lots of difficult stages. I had to work quite hard because I have not had much time in the car since last year, and although I was very confident in my driving in the short stages it was not so comfortable in the longer ones. We had some problems with the brakes on the very high stages as they were overheating, but other than that we were lucky compared to some of the other crews and did not take much damage.

"It was good to get to the finish of such a good event and now we can look to improve again at Rally Jordan,” he added.