Thierry Neuville’s World Rally Championship title hopes have been strengthened by a stellar performance on the Saturday running of Croatia Rally, outgunning Toyota pair Elfyn Evans and Sébastien Ogier despite a suboptimal tire strategy.
All three Hyundai drivers were carrying two hard tires, two soft tires and two wet tires, while Toyota’s trio went for four softs and two wets.
That gave the upper hand to Toyota as rain had fallen on the first two stages of the afternoon loop, making some sections damp.
Despite the apparent disadvantage, Neuville was able to retake the lead on SS14 anyway, having lost it to Evans a stage earlier, then won the next two stages to extend his advantage to 4.9s.
“It’s not a big lead but we had a great day,” said Neuville. “Despite a not perfect tire choice, we were capable of defending our position.”
Evans conceded that, on Saturday at least, he simply wasn’t able to match Neuville’s rapid pace: “What can I say? It’s been a good day,” said Evans. “Some good driving – but I couldn’t quite follow Thierry.”
That has title race implication, provided both drivers finish on Sunday. Neuville has provisionally banked 18 points in the championship for leading at the end of Saturday’s action, with Evans scoring 15.
Ogier wasn’t quite able to keep pace with the current championship leader either. He initially cut the lead gap to 7.6s when Neuville struggled with the hard tires on the front of his Hyundai i20 N Rally1 on stage 13, but the lead Hyundai then undid all that damage to end up 11.6s ahead of Ogier, 0.3s further up the road than he’d started the afternoon.
Fourth place was somewhat cemented by Ott Tänak in the afternoon. He was faster than Adrien Fourmaux across all four of Saturday afternoon’s stages, expanding his advantage over the lead M-Sport car to 19.9s.
Despite losing ground and having to settle for fifth place, Fourmaux was hardly disheartened. Instead, he was focused on the positives of being able to keep the 2019 world champion within arm’s reach for so long.
“We’ve been fighting with Ott for the last two days so it’s been really positive to fight with a world champion,” he said. “I wanted to beat him but we’re a little but behind, so until next time…”
There was little to fight for behind the top five: big gaps between Toyota’s Takamoto Katsuta in sixth, the third Hyundai of Andreas Mikkelsen in seventh and Grégoire Munster’s Ford Puma in eighth meant they remained comfortably in their respective positions all day.
Mikkelsen’s day was sketchy at times: he overshot a junction in the morning and then ran wide at a left-hander which put him off into the grass, though continued unhindered thereafter.
An all-Citroën battle for WRC2 victory featured plenty of twists and turns. Yohan Rossel had initially been eating into Nikolay Gryazin’s lead on Saturday morning, taking almost 10s away from his team-mate until a puncture on stage 12.
Rossel then made a point to “not have the same tires” as Gryazin for the afternoon loop, which initially worked brilliantly: across the first two afternoon stages the 2021 WRC3 champion had cut the gap to Gryazin from 59.9s to 24.7s.
But Rossel and co-driver Arnaud Dunand then shot themselves in the foot by making a self-inflicted timecard mistake at the start line of the day’s final test, incurring a 10s penalty that leaves them 39.5s from the top spot with only four Sunday stages left.
Sami Pajari still holds third position by 14.8s from Gus Greensmith, despite a big sideways moment on the day’s final test that was close to spinning him around entirely. Despite the near-miss, he was still fastest on the stage.
Neither Pajari nor Greensmith are registered for WRC2 points, so Pepe López in fifth place currently has third-place points in his back pocket for now. López was outpaced in the afternoon Nicolas Ciamin in his newly upgraded Hyundai i20 N Rally2, with the one-time Junior WRC runner-up now only 10.8s shy of López’s position.
Eyvind Brynildsen has been bearing down on Lauri Joona in the battle for seventh in WRC2, cutting the deficit to 10.8s despite a near-miss on the morning pass of Stojdraga.
Entering a sweeping right-hander, the rear-left of Brynildsen’s Škoda Fabia struck an armco barrier, though he was able to continue unhindered and even took 13.9s out of Joona on said stage.
Emil Lindholm inherited ninth when Georg Linnamaë retired; Roberto Daprá completes the top 10.
