Banbury's Subaru World Rally Team will travel to Spain with three works entries as the World Rally Championship returns to tarmac.

The Rally RACC Catalunya Costa Daurada (October 2-5) is the penultimate tarmac event of the year and the first half of a back-to-back asphalt double-header on which the SWRT will be running a trio of Impreza WRC2008s for the first time.

Alongside the works entries of Petter Solberg and Chris Atkinson, SWRT will run a third factory car for both this rally and the next round in Corsica.

Impreza WRC2008 number 15 will be driven by Frenchman Brice Tirabassi, the 2003 JWRC Champion.

Rally Catalunya is often said to be the closest the WRC gets to a circuit race, owing to its smooth and flowing asphalt surface. Most of the rally route has been resurfaced over the years making the roads clean and grippy, in contrast to the dirty asphalt of the last sealed surface event in Germany in mid-August.

Paul Howarth, Subaru World Rally Team operations director, said: "There are lots of long, long corners in Spain on very smooth tarmac so grip is good and speeds are generally quite high.

"This means the lateral loads on the cars and tyres are also very high. The rally is all about rhythm, and very early on it will be obvious if anyone hasn't got settled.

"We are in the Tarragona region so we don't go up into the hills where the rally used to be, which means that pretty much all the route is fast to medium-fast.

"We have a mixture of hard and soft compound Pirelli tyres, which will have to be strategically used to account for the sudden rain showers that can change everything. With our focus on gravel development, we haven't been able to do a pre-event test here so there'll be a bit to learn."

Solberg said: "I've been preparing myself to the maximum since New Zealand, and I hope we can build on what we had in Germany.

"I really had good fun driving there, so I definitely hope we can have even more fun in Spain. It won't be easy, but it's a rally I like and the route is fun to drive anyway.

"Spain is a very different rally to Germany with very different roads, a lot cleaner and more flowing, but if you can drive, you can drive, so it's not that big a change. We're always driving flat out anyway, so you don't do much different inside the car. It'll be an important rally though as it'll go a long way to deciding the result in Corsica the week after."