Home hero Ott Tänak won Thursday evening’s opening superspecial stage, but it is Elfyn Evans and Esapekka Lappi who jointly hold the Rally Estonia lead after Tänak incurred a five-minute penalty for an engine change.
The Tartu vald superspecial takes place next to the service park in front of a large crowd. It has doubled in length from last year’s version to just over two miles, but remains more tight and twisty than the rest of the event’s stages.
Tänak at least gave the home fans something to smile about, attacking the stage and achieving a time that was 0.6 seconds faster than Evans and Lappi. It did little to improve his own mood, though, perhaps just emphasizing what might have been.
“Nothing much to say,” said Tänak.
“The more I have to go through today, the more it hurts. It’s getting more and more painful. Our chances for the championship were quite tight anyway, considering our performance this year, and we were working hard for these two next ones. This was a proper kick to the balls.”
Lappi, quietly confident after an impressive start to his Hyundai career, flew through the stage to set a benchmark for the championship frontrunners to chase. Asked whether he had a car capable of winning the event, he smiled: “Yep, we do.”
Evans’s Toyota GR Yaris ran slightly wide in one corner but was still able to match the time of Lappi, who benefited from a saving of around 20kg by not carrying a spare wheel.
Evans, whose co-driver Scott Martin is contesting his 170th WRC event this weekend, was focused more on tomorrow’s stages. “Pretty technical to start actually, very, very blind, so that first one is a proper test to get us going.”
Just 0.1s slower than Lappi and Evans was championship leader Kalle Rovanperä’s Yaris. “I didn’t stress too much about this one, it’s a tricky stage so we just did a clean run through,” he said. “No push or anything.
“Tomorrow is going to be interesting, I think tomorrow we need to push a bit more than today. Definitely opening the road will be a big, big challenge – it seems there is a lot of loose gravel on Friday’s stages, so we need to do our best tomorrow and see where we are.”
Fifth fastest, to lie fourth overall, was Thierry Neuville, who is known not to be at his best on the super-fast stages that make up the majority of the event. He was faster than team-mate Lappi through the opening section, but ended up dropping one second.
Takamoto Katsuta, Teemu Suninen – on his return to a front-line drive with Hyundai – and Pierre-Louis Loubet completed the Rally1 field.
In WRC2, Mikołaj Marczyk’s Škoda Fabia RS went fastest by just 0.1s over home driver Georg Linnamäe’s Hyundai i20 N.
Third quickest was Andreas Mikkelsen (Škoda), 0.7s back, ahead of Oliver Solberg’s similar car. Sami Pajari (Škoda) and Josh McErlean (Hyundai) complete the early top six, who are all covered by just two seconds.
It was a difficult start to his Hyundai career for Emil Lindholm though, who made an error that broke his car’s rear-left suspension. It did not appear to affect his pace through the short stage enormously, as he dropped 6.7s to Marczyk, but gives his team plenty of work to do in the first service.
