Kalle Rovanperä leads Rally Chile into the final day over team-mate Elfyn Evans, turning the screw as fog descended on the stages.
Evans had been looking relatively unchallenged en route to his first ever maximum points haul from a Saturday in the World Rally Championship.
After the afternoon’s first stage, Evans found himself 13.6s in front after a third stage win from four for the day.
But extreme fog on SS11 flipped everything on its head, and Rovanperä did a mega job to steal 19.1s from Evans and with it, the rally lead.
That gave the world champion a 5.5s advantage starting the final stage of the day, which again in parts offered very little by the way of visibility to the drivers.
Having seized his chance on the previous stage, Rovanperä wasn’t about to let it go as he added another 9.6s to his lead, to head Evans by 15.1s going into Sunday.
“Commitment this time, I didn’t have the same feeling,” Evans reasoned. “Tricky conditions and we didn’t maximize ourselves in there.”
Thierry Neuville ended Saturday content he did all that he could – finishing fourth, just one place behind his closest championship rival, and team-mate, Ott Tänak which provisionally costs him just three championship points.
Tänak however lost a chunk of time, carrying hard tires when softs would’ve been the better bet.
“Let’s say no rain expected this evening and obviously we had completely wrong information,” he said. “This caught us out quite badly.”
Adrien Fourmaux would’ve been in the podium places were it not for a one-minute penalty following an alternator belt repair on Friday, but as it is he’s a lonely fifth overall.
Sami Pajari is sixth, just 1.1s ahead of Grégoire Munster with Esapekka Lappi several minutes down in eighth after a two-minute time penalty for an early check-in – something Lappi confirmed was a calculation error and “misunderstanding” – then prompted him to relax his pace and just make the end of the day.
Mārtiņš Sesks successfully negotiated the leg as first car on the road on a day that caught out Sébastien Ogier. The eight-time champion clipped a rock which broke a bolt in his suspension and forced him to retire in the morning.
Having stopped to change a puncture on Saturday’s penultimate stage, Oliver Solberg sent it on the final one but still trails by over a minute.
Nikolay Gryazin heads the standings from Gus Greensmith, with Solberg down in fourth.
