Jordan Rally, the fourth round of the FIA Middle East Rally Championship, will play host to an international crowd of drivers and officials as the next FIA World Rally Championship candidate event is set to take place this weekend in Amman. The number of represented countries will be nine: United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Ireland and Lebanon.
Leading the field will be Nasser Saleh Al-Attiyah, who has captured victory in each of the previous FIA Middle East Rally Championship rounds. Attiyah will be paired with co-driver Chris Patterson.
His nearest rivals are Qatar team-mate Misfer Al-Marri and Dubai's Sheikh Suhail Bin Khalifa Al-Maktoum. Both drivers will drive to reduce the gap Attiyah has created in the previous rounds, but the task will be difficult. Attiyah recently won the FIA Production Car World Rally Championship class in Argentina just last month along with his three consecutive victories in the Middle East Championship.
"The stages are very smooth, quite fast and potentially very difficult," said Al-Marri. "They can be slippery and there is no margin for error. If you make a mistake here, then you could be in big trouble."
The rally is not only important to the drivers seeking a championship title, Jordan Rally is also playing host to the FIA in an attempt to join the 2007 WRC calendar. "No event in the Middle East region has ever been a part of the FIA World Rally Championship, so we know that the stakes are huge and the prize is within reach," said Ziad Louza, Clerk of the Course of this year's event. "We have received very favourable feedback so far and our entire team is relishing the prospect of a busy and very exciting few days. We started out on this long road back in 1982 when the event was rated nationally by the FIA and then we joined the regional championship one year later."
With the amount of candidate events vying for a spot in the top level of the sport, Jordan Rally hopes to showcase 18 timed special stages in the Dead Sea and Rumman areas of Jordan to the west of Amman. Several of these stages are completely new and others have been rebuilt, regraded and finely-honed to the exacting requirements of the FIA World Rally Championship.
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