The start of the 2010 World Rally Championship season and the arrival of superstar driver Kimi Raikkonen have generated unprecedented online interest in the series around the globe.
Raikkonen's decision to turn his back on the F1 circuit in favour of a WRC season with Citroen has been one of the biggest stories of the year so far in his home country of Finland.
Record numbers of users have visited the sports website of Finland's WRC broadcasters, MTV3, with 468,500 unique visitors in the last week of January. Of these, 250,000 were in the rally section which was covering Raikkonen's progress on the Arctic Lapland Rally.
Only the Finnish round of the series in 2009 attracted a greater number of visitors to MTV3's rally site (279,000).
WRC fever continued into the Swedish Rally when MTV3's rally site attracted its third best audience ever, 248,191, as Finnish online rally fans celebrated Mikko Hirvonen's maiden WRC victory in 2010.
The World Rally Championship's own website, wrc.com, also had a record breaking weekend, with almost eight million page views during the rally, and a single day record of three million on Friday.
Meanwhile membership of the WRC's official Facebook community continues to grow at its fastest rate ever. The group now has more than 100,000 members - with 10,000 signing up in the last fortnight alone.
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