Sébastien Ogier has retired from Saturday on Rally Chile after hitting a rock and coming to a halt near the end of SS8.
Ogier had initially led the rally but his weekend was undone by a puncture, caused by smacking a bank, on Friday’s third stage.
That dropped the eight-time champion down to ninth and prompted him to roll the dice on Saturday morning with a soft-biased tire choice – on stages where Toyotas all hit trouble using soft rubber 12 months ago.
“From the position we have, we have to try something,” Ogier reasoned.
He had managed to go second fastest on SS7 however his rally has come to an end on the following stage, as the Toyota ran over a rock on the apex of a slight corner and left Ogier unable to steer the car into the succeeding left-hander.
Instead Ogier ran straight with clear damage to the car. Both he and co-driver Vincent Landais are OK.
“It’s hard to explain honestly,” Ogier told DirtFish. “I just checked my recce video and there is a rock on the edge of the road on the right side, on the braking point, and it doesn’t seem to be really on the line at all.
“But on the brake I felt a very little impact and the wheel has a little damage, but unfortunately it broke the bolts of the suspension arm. Nearly no damage – one bolt back and the car would run but yeah, that was it.
“It’s very strange, it’s a question of centimeters and maybe my line was a little bit too much on the right in this moment but I didn’t expect that – I didn’t have any rocks on my note now because it didn’t look to be on the line at all.
“That’s the way it is – it doesn’t work at the moment unfortunately for us, even if the speed is great. But it doesn’t help, speed is not enough in rally. You need to have all around the things working, the consistency and don’t do any mistakes.
“I don’t know if we can call it a mistake, probably it is when you hit these little rocks. But when I see the split time after the stage, from second on the road what we were still doing was great.
“But from hero to zero, like we say. Let’s try again tomorrow.”
