Hyundai holds a lockout of the podium places on Acropolis Rally Greece, led by Ott Tänak, after Sébastien Ogier became the third and final Toyota to run into trouble on the opening day.
Ott Tänak had been in the mix for the lead since the start of the rally, battling Ogier, Takamoto Katsuta and Adrien Fourmaux early doors.
Katsuta was first to fall, ripping a wheel off on the first pass of the Tarzan test. Fourmaux then went out one stage later, hitting a rock and damaging the front-right corner.
Ogier then fell by the wayside when he suffered a turbo failure, a fate that had already befallen Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans on Friday morning and cost the Welshman almost nine minutes.
Attempts to fix the problem roadside by Ogier also failed, as they had for Evans, leaving him to limp through the second pass of Tarzan and lose over two minutes.
“It looks like Seb has lost boost pressure from the turbocharger,” said Tom Fowler, Toyota technical director. “Elfyn’s car had the same symptoms. With Elfyn, we know what the root cause is and with Séb at the moment we are assuming it is something similar, but until we get the cars back here to service, we cannot say for sure.
“It is a huge disappointment because clearly it is another rally after Finland where we have had really strong performance in the car and in Finland, we did not capitalize on that. It looks like here, again, we are not going to capitalize on the potential performance that both the cars and drivers have.
“At the moment it is a disappointment but Séb has done an amazing job in the last stage to lose much less than we expected.”
That left Tänak to resume the lead, leading Dani Sordo by 21.8s and with championship leader Thierry Neuville completing the podium, 45.2s behind Tänak.
“We need to be very grateful for a trouble-free day,” said Tänak. “It’s incredibly difficult with the temperature and roughness. It’s far from over and we all know what’s coming. There’s still hard work ahead.”
Evans ran into more drama on the final stage of the day
Evans suffered yet another technical gremlin on the last stage of the day, though he wouldn’t be drawn into discussing what exactly was amiss after losing 45s on the day’s final stage: “Just managing something small, that’s all,” he said. He’s just shy of 10 minutes off the lead.
Sordo was sympathetic towards his rivals’ troubles but is now focused on ensuring Hyundai keep their podium lockout intact.
“It’s not nice for sure when the others have problems but it’s part of the job,” he said. “It’s a really difficult rally, we have some drivers with problems, some make mistakes, but we stay there. I’m sure we have a really strong car.”
Grégoire Munster had finally moved into fifth place on stage five, only to lose it straight away when he stopped to change a front-right puncture – only to then suffer a delamination on the rear-left in the final split of Tarzan’s section pass. He fell to seventh place as a consequence.
“We didn’t have the handbrake once again,” explained Munster. “The problem is sometimes you hit with the sidewall because you cannot make the car turn, so front-right puncture.”
WRC2 had been dominated early on by Yohan Rossel. But when the Citroën driver had to stop and change a puncture on the second pass of Tarzan, the floodgates opened for challengers to stake their claim for the class lead.
Gus Greensmith, who’d gone fastest on shakedown, should have been in prime position to capitalize. Instead, he hit a cow – the animal walked away but the Škoda Fabia RS Rally2 went no further.
Sami Pajari had held second place until the final stage but he was usurped by Robert Virves by 11.1s on Tarzan 2, promoting the 2022 Junior WRC champion to a 1.5s lead overnight.
