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Subaru rally driver, Cody Crocker, has taken an emphatic victory in the Rally of Canberra and extended his lead in the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship.

Crocker finished one minutes 3.6 seconds ahead of Japan's Katsu Taguchi, with fellow Subaru driver Dean Herridge in third place, one minute 51.8 seconds behind the leader.

The victory was Crocker's third successive win in the nation's capital and his fourth from the last five years.

The MotorImage backed driver collected a total of 16 championship points, to take his tally from two events to 32, seven clear of Taguchi on 25 points, with 2005 Asia-Pacific Champion, Jussi Valimaki from Finland, third on 23 points.

Crocker and co-driver Ben Atkinson had some steering difficulties on the final stage yesterday, but their crew fixed the issue with the Impreza WRX STI in the service and they appeared this morning in a car the Victorian described as "perfect".

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The three-time Australian champion immediately made his intentions clear, winning the first four stages of the day to build on his overnight lead of just 12.5 seconds. By day's end he'd set the fastest time on six of the eight special stages.

"We're rapt," Crocker said. "The car was brilliant today. On the second pass over stages I just couldn't believe how much grip we had."
"We've been refining the set-up and the changes have been all positive. We're getting more speed out of the car and it felt pretty spot-on today."

"It is a really strong start to our championship defence. We really wanted to take the maximum points because your home event should be your strongest, so to drop points here would have been disappointing."
"But now we've off to a really good start, I know and like Hokkaido, so we're really feeling very confident at the moment."

The next round of the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship is Rally Hokkaido in Japan on the weekend of July 6-8.