WRC: Ogier feels he owes VW home win

World Rally champion Sebastien Ogier wants to repay Volkswagen for what he describes as "extremely bad" past Rally Germany performances this weekend.

While the Hannover-based team has dominated the last two and a half WRC seasons, winning every other rally on the calendar, the VW Polo R WRC has failed miserably – a third place for Andreas Mikkelsen last season aside – to make the same impact on its home round of the championship.

Ogier won in Germany in a Citroen in 2011, but has crashed three times in the last two years of the Trier-based event.

"It's fair to say that my performance on the Rally Germany for the two last years has been extremely bad," he said. "I have a good challenge ahead of me this week to do it better, especially for my team; they offered me so much and it's thanks to them that I was so successful in the last two and a half years. I really hope this year I'm going to give them the result they deserve."

Team principal Jost Capito admitted a win this week would go down well, with the focus of the Volkswagen Board on the stages around Trier.

"It's not that we have not been competitive," said Capito. "If we had not been competitive, we would have been much more nervous about this week. It's the circumstances which have made it harder for us to win, this time we hope these circumstances will be different.

"We didn't change anything in our preparation for the rally. We did everything we could last year and we will do everything we can this year – nothing changes. It's the final piece of the jigsaw, we have won every other rally in the championship and this is the one we want.

"The home rally is always a special one and there is, of course, the pressure with the guests and the focus from the board on Rally Germany. Winning this is event is something we are really pushing hard to achieve."

VW made a good start to Rally Germany, posting three of the top four fastest times at shakedown on Thursday morning.

Rally Finland winner Jari-Matti Latvala transferred his speed from gravel to asphalt to win the stage, with Mikkelsen just two tenths of a second down on him.

Ogier was the third-fastest Polo – fourth in the classification behind Citroen's Kris Meeke. The Frenchman was 0.8s behind Latvala and a tenth down on the Northern Irishman's DS 3 WRC.

Originally on Autosport.com