Juho Hanninen has been offered a seat in the Skoda Fabia Super 2000 for 2009

Juho Hanninen has apparently been offered a drive by Skoda Motorsport in the Fabia S2000 for the 2009 season, according to autosport.cz.

Hanninen, who won this year's IRC Rally Russia, was testing the Skoda super 2000 recently in Austria and suffered a major accident by putting the car off into trees. It appears there was some engine management issue which caused the accident, but the problem has since been identified and sorted by Oreca's engineer Mario Fornaris.

Skoda Motorsport completed a very successful test last week in the French Alps with Jan Kopecky and Gilles Panizzi. They covered over 300km in testing and reported no problems.

It would seem Skoda would also run Kopecky with Hanninen next year as part of a two car team, but Gilles Panizzi and Francois Duval have also been linked with possible drives. It is still not clear who will be running the cars though Skoda Motorsport could run them themselves, though various satellite teams have been linked.

The Skoda Fabia S2000 is still scheduled to be homologated for January 1st '09 and could make its competitive debut on the Janner Rally in Austria. Then it will run on the IRC Rallye Monte Carlo.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Juho Hanninen video testing the Skoda Fabia S2000 recently on asphalt
• Paolo Andreucci has been offered a drive by Skoda Italy in the Fabia Super 2000 for the 2009 (CIR) Italian rally championship
• Gilles Panizzi, Juho Hanninen and Jan Kopecky will form a three car Skoda team for IRC Rallye Monte Carlo 2009
• Video Juho Hanninen and Jan Kopecky Skoda Monte Carlo test December
• Gilles Panizzi has been testing the Skoda Fabia S2000 on asphalt again, this time in the Alps Maritimes