Round 8 of the FIA Production Car World Rally Championship (P-WRC), “Rally de France” was held in Alsace in Eastern France from October 1 - 3 with Japanese driver Toshi Arai finishing third in his WRX STI.

The WRC event in France has become a completely new rally, moving from its long-time base in Corsica to Alsace near the German border. Along with Arai, the line-up of Subaru P-WRC drivers in this new-look rally was Anders Grondal (Norway), Gianluca Linari (Italy), Rui Wang (China), Nuno Barroso Pereira (Portugal) and David Weston Jr. (UK). Taking part in his first P-WRC event at the tender age of 20, the Brit drove for Uspenskiy Rally Tecnica, which substituted him for its regular driver Patrik Flodin who missed this event.

The rally was all-tarmac like in Corsica, but rain before the start and a lot of gravel being pulled onto the roads posed extremely slippery conditions and challenges for the crews. Anders Grondal was running second on the first day, but was forced into a painful retirement when he got a puncture in both the front and rear left tyres on the last stage of Day 2 with only one spare in his car. On the same day, Arai also suffered a puncture on the long stage and lost almost 3 and a half minutes changing tyres. However, he moved up to third following Grondal’s misfortune and kept the position until the end to finish the rally on the podium. Restarting on Day 3, Grondal fought back to finish 5th and Rui Wang followed him in 6th.