Sébastien Ogier is one day away from completing the perfect comeback, as a Kalle Rovanperä puncture helped him into the lead of Rally del Paraguay after Saturday.
Ever since losing 37s with a puncture on the second stage, Ogier has thrown caution to the wind and powered his way up the leaderboard.
Starting Saturday in fourth place, the Toyota driver quickly moved up to third when Ott Tänak punctured, and then hassled erstwhile leader Adrien Fourmaux to eventually steal second spot.
Closing to 14.4s behind his team-mate Rovanperä, Ogier – who was the only Rally1 driver to take just one spare Hankook for the afternoon loop – was applying the pressure, but in the end Rovanperä was stung by a puncture of his own.
Admitting he and co-driver Jonne Halttunen made a mistake in not stopping to change it, Rovanperä gave up over 2m30s and plummeted to sixth overall – ending any hopes of a third victory of the season. The fastest time to complete the day was little consolation.
“It doesn’t matter so much at the moment,” Rovanperä said. “Obviously big disappointment on the previous one, but I have been getting used to it this year. There have been many disappointments this year, we live to see another day.”
Rovanperä was philosophical at the end of the final stage of the day
As for Ogier, he heads into Sunday’s final leg of four stages with a 10.3s advantage over Fourmaux. He however didn’t have the best of final stages, “struggling with the grip” and feeling like he didn’t drive well. But he was content his decision to take just one spare was the right call.
With a maiden WRC victory in sight though, Fourmaux isn’t giving up on catching Ogier – even if he recognized the job the eight-time champion did on Saturday.
“Séb did a really good job to be fair,” said Fourmaux, “but he took some risks I would say with all the rocks and taking only five wheels. We’ll see if we can improve a bit the car for tomorrow, and we can still try.”
World championship leader Elfyn Evans is third after Saturday, just 2.5s ahead of Tänak who’s targeted getting ahead of Evans. Thierry Neuville completes the top-five overnight.
Tänak said: “We have nothing else to do, we need to try. At least we are close and the pressure is on.”
Sami Pajari is a lonely seventh after stopping to change a puncture on Friday. M-Sport’s Josh McErlean had been seventh but retired before the day’s second stage after an impact on the first damaged his sump guard and allowed the engine’s oil to escape.
Team-mate Grégoire Munster had been nowhere in the overall classification after losing over 45 minutes on Friday, chiefly due to changing a steering arm on the very first stage. But he too retired on Saturday with a very similar issue to McErlean.
Takamoto Katsuta spent a “horrible” day road cleaning in his Toyota, returning to action after ripping a wheel off on Friday.
Robert Virves leads WRC2 in his Škoda Fabia RS Rally2 by 6.5s over championship leader Oliver Solberg.
Nikolay Gryazin had taken first from overnight leader Yohan Rossel, but stopping to change a puncture on the day’s penultimate stage dropped him to fourth.
Citroën pilot Rossel had been second prior to the final stage, but Solberg stormed past to head his championship rival by 0.7s overnight.
