Jari-Matti Latvala increased his lead of the Swedish Rally to 53.9 seconds on an incident-filled second morning that saw the leaderboard take on a totally new look.

Starting the day with 48.2 seconds in hand, Latvala had no need to push too hard, and the 22-year-old Finn was suitably cautious on the first runs through Horssjon, Hagfors and Vargasen.

Nevertheless, the Ford driver still set times good enough for the top five on each stage and pushed his lead up to over a minute by the end of stage ten.

But, with his team-mate Mikko Hirvonen beginning to feel the heat from behind, he sped up on stage 11 and took eight seconds back out of Latvala, reducing his deficit to 53.9.

"I'm not so much [feeling any pressure]," said Latvala. "This stage [11], I haven't done it many times because usually I've had problems before now on this event, so I was steady.

"Everything's going to plan though and I'm very confident for the rest of the event."

It was behind the top two that the drama really unfolded. Henning Solberg, who began the day in third and only eight seconds behind Hirvonen, suffered a front-left puncture on the opening stage of the day after clipping a rock.

"I drove 5km on the flat tyre and I lost a lot of time for sure," said Solberg. "Everyone has been on the same corners though, so I don't know why it happened just to me."

The time loss of around half a minute dropped him eight seconds behind his Stobart Ford team-mate Gigi Galli and back to fourth place.

He reduced his arrears to just 3.3 seconds on stage ten, but blew his chance of re-gaining the podium position on 11 as he crashed into a ditch and out of the rally four kilometres from the end of the stage.

His retirement elevated his younger brother Petter into fourth place in a Subaru he described as "undriveable" after the team changed the differential settings overnight.

Fifth now, and on course to score points in Sweden for the first time in his career, is Britain's Matthew Wilson in his Stobart Ford.

Wilson though, will have to spend the afternoon fighting off the advancing Andreas Mikkelsen after the Norwegian teenager - freed from the turbo problems that plagued his opening day - set some great times in his Ramsport Ford.

Mikkelsen, who was over 1:10 behind Wilson at the start of the day, closed to within half a minute of him by service.

Both drivers were helped by crashes for Mads Ostberg and Toni Gardemeister. Mikkelsen, who began the day sixth, but crashed on the first stage of the day and suffered a puncture, dropping to 19th by the end of stage 11.

"I missed my braking point at a 90 degree left hander," said Ostberg. "There was so much snow in the road, I came over a crest and there was no gravel like in the rest of the stage, so I just slid off.

"There were lots of people that helped us out of the ditch, but then we had a puncture so we had to change that and we lost lots of time."

His crash allowed Gardemeister up to sixth, and would have put him fifth had he not spun his Suzuki into a snowbank and lost four minutes himself at the same time that Solberg was having his accident.

Khalid Al Qassimi was another to lose ground as he slid his Ford into a ditch on stage ten and then clobbered a snowbank on 11, necessitating a length stop as he cleared snow out of his car's radiator to prevent his engine from overheating.

The accidents on stage ten though, have taken their toll on the rally itself as organisers elected to cancel stage 12 - the re-run through Horssjon - for safety reasons.

With the amount of gravel coming up on the stage, almost all of the studs on the control Pirelli tyres were getting ripped out, leaving drivers with no grip for the later, icier stages, something rally officials deemed to be unneccesarily dangerous.

The main beneficiary of all the problems however, was Dani Sordo. The Spaniard was fastest on stage ten and in the top four on all of them, allowing him to move up from 18th to seventh in his Citroen.

Swede Patrik Sandell is a brilliant eighth overall - and leading the Group N category - in his Super 2000-spec Peugeot, but is only four seconds clear of Juho Hanninen in a more conventional Group N Mitsubishi and a minute ahead of Gardemeister in tenth.

Day two saw Sebastien Loeb re-start with a 20-minute penalty under SupeRally rules. He was fastest on stage nine and ten and climbed up from 50th to 40th. Chris Atkinson made similar progress for Subaru, rising from 43rd to 35th.

Jamie O'Leary / Eurosport