Ott Tänak has wrestled the lead of Rally Chile away from Elfyn Evans after five of Friday’s six stages, as Adrien Fourmaux battled an alternator issue.
The Estonian, who is the only driver ever to win Rally Chile, set an impressive pace on the first stage of the afternoon to vault up from fifth to second; trimming Evans’ lead to just 2.7s.
Seeing the times, Toyota driver Evans recognized he “clearly has some work to do” but he failed to prevent Tänak’s charge on SS5 – losing another 5.2s to slip to 2.5s behind.
“I’m not feeling so good now on the second pass,” Evans revealed. “It was all working fine this morning but it’s not so good now.”
Fourmaux had moved up two positions to fourth on the first stage of the afternoon, but mechanical drama before SS5 dumped him down the leaderboard.
Due to start the stage at 3.53pm, the M-Sport driver instead started nine minutes late at 4.02pm and was handed a one-minute time penalty as a result.
But he did incredibly well to remain in the rally and set the second fastest time on the stage.
“We had an issue with the alternator,” Fourmaux began. “We fixed it. I damaged one pipe, then we had to fix it. We fixed two things where at the beginning it was only one – we are still in the game!”
Kalle Rovanperä overshot a slow-speed corner on the first stage of the afternoon, running off and hitting a gate with the front of his Toyota.
The excursion cost the world champion position to Tänak in an incident he described as “nothing too dramatic”.
What was of more concern through was adjusted notional times, with the organizers basing times for most crews on SS1 – which was cancelled but all for three drivers on spectators safety grounds – off their performance on SS4.
“It’s not optimal when you do it on a stage when this one affects the time of the morning also,” Rovanperä added, “but yeah that’s it.”
Rovanperä is third overall, 7.2s off the lead and 1.7s ahead of Grégoire Munster who is quietly impressing in fourth overall.
“The stage before we didn’t have so much confidence but here we can be clean and we really enjoyed this run,” he said.
The M-Sport driver is 2.8s clear of Toyota’s Sami Pajari who felt he still had a lot to improve on his second event in a Rally1 machine. However he is just 10s shy of the rally lead.
Thierry Neuville finds himself down in sixth, describing life as first car on the road as “horrible”.
“I have zero grip,” he expanded. “I’m really, really, really trying to keep it on the road but it’s a real fight – not nice.”
Life is worse for Hyundai team-mate Esapekka Lappi though, whose weekend took a turn for the worse when his rear-right tire delaminated on SS4.
“On the straight, I don’t know [how it happened]. For sure I did not hit anything, so bad luck,” Lappi lamented.
Sébastien Ogier remains last of the running Rally1 cars, but the Frenchman has been unrivalled in terms of pace on Friday afternoon so far.
Winning SS4 by 5.9s, Ogier was again quickest on SS5 but by a slenderer 0.2s.
