On Saturday afternoon it seemed Rally Italy Sardinia was settled. Sébastien Ogier had pulled out a 17.1-second advantage over Hyundai’s Ott Tänak after a day and a half of swapping times and even the lead itself at times.
The lead fight was surely put to bed. But Ott Tänak wasn’t going to take Sunday lying down. Seeking more points, he pushed hard. He started to zone in on the lead Toyota almost as a by-product of trying to stop Hyundai team-mate Thierry Neuville from scoring maximum Sunday points.
Then came the unthinkable. A 6.2s lead before the powerstage would surely be enough. But a tire off the rim on the final pass of Sassari delivered one last powerful blow. Ogier’s 2024 three-peat was no more.
Once upon a time Ogier had been on the other side of the fence. He’d nicked Rally Jordan victory away from his now-team boss Jari-Matti Latvala in 2011 by 0.2s. Now Tänak had done to him what he’d done to Latvala.
It's the second time Jari-Matti Latvala has lost a win by 0.2 seconds. The first was as a driver against Ogier in 2011 – now it's as a team principal against Hyundai
It’s easy to focus on the margin and the full-circle element of Jordan 13 years earlier. It turns out the eight-time world champion isn’t bothered by how narrowly he missed the win. That he lost the rally win at all is what occupied his mind.
“It’s not really a new experience,” Ogier told DirtFish. “If you’re beaten by 0.1s or a minute, it doesn’t change anything. At the end of the day, you’re just the first loser and that’s what matters. Sometimes s*** happens, like we say in motorsports.
“In the end I think I can still be happy with the weekend I’ve done in the car. Sometimes it doesn’t go your way. The second puncture on the weekend was one too much.”
Tänak knows all about events going south in Sassari. It happened to him in 2019, when the power steering on his Yaris Rally1 failed and cost him an otherwise certain victory to Dani Sordo.
Been there, done that. Tänak and Sassari had prior history – but it's all square now
Having been there and done that, Tänak couldn’t help but feel empathetic towards Ogier’s last-minute loss.
“It’s a bunch of emotions, especially from the moment when you don’t really expect it, and a bit of good statistics as well,” said Tänak afterwards. “It definitely made the [Hyundai] guys happy. But from the other side, it’s a really cruel way that it’s been taken from Séb. I can only say that I’ve been there before and I’ve had 40 seconds in hand and it’s still been taken.”
Those emotions were the final element of the surprise result. At regroup Tänak had suggested that trying to hunt down Ogier for the lead was pointless; a “new rally” had started on Sunday with a fresh batch of points up for grabs. Ogier was there for the rally, for the glory and the joy of standing on the top step. Tänak was there for the championship. In a brave new rallying world where points and prizes aren’t fully correlated, the former took precedence over the latter.
