Sébastien Ogier produced a near-perfect performance to lead Rally Japan after Friday ahead of Toyota team-mates Takamoto Katsuta and Elfyn Evans.
Fellow Toyota pilot Kalle Rovanperä was, however, the leg’s big loser after he broke his rear-left suspension after contact with an SS3 barrier and surrendered over five minutes.
Rovanperä had led the event after Thursday afternoon’s opener, but it was Ogier who swiftly hit the front on Friday morning ahead of home hero Katsuta.
Katsuta then took the lead after the event’s third stage, only to immediately lose it again to Ogier after Isegami’s Tunnel.
The classic test is one where Ogier has suffered plenty of punctures in the past, so he approached it with a degree of caution on the first pass and allowed championship leader Evans to close to just 1.0s behind overall.
But with the pacenotes “confirmed” for the second pass immediately after service, Ogier made his move. Extending his lead to 4.9s, Ogier was in the groove and took a brace of stage wins across the afternoon to end the day with a 7.9s advantage.
“It’s been a good day, happy with that,” Ogier surmised. “I think we did what we had to do today. Still a long way to go, but we try to keep our [title] chances alive up to the last rally.”
Katsuta is currently separating the two title challengers, successfully defending Evans by 2.3s. Evans won the final stage of the day, however would really benefit from overhauling Katsuta as he’s currently set to lose 10 of his 13-point championship advantage.
“Séb’s pulled the pin out a bit this afternoon and I haven’t had the pace to follow it,” Evans confessed. “But it’s still a long rally to go, so we’ll keep trying.”
Rovanperä meanwhile fell as low as 23rd after his damage in the morning, but climbed back up to 17th by the end of the day.
“We know that we have a target: we just try to climb up some positions and see on Sunday if we can get some points. That’s the only thing we can do,” he said.
Sami Pajari showed strong pace on several stages on Friday but lost fourth place to the leading Hyundai, Adrien Fourmaux, on the leg’s final test.
While his team-mates Ott Tänak and Thierry Neuville struggled for confidence or pace (Neuville unaided by a rear diff problem in the morning too), Fourmaux adapted the car and his driving style to good effect.
On a bad day for Hyundai, Fourmaux's times offered some encouragement
He ended Friday 0.3s ahead of Pajari, and a whopping 48.3s ahead of Tänak who, in turn, has 21.2s in hand over Neuville.
Neuville was at least encouraged by his final two stages of the day, where he managed to get his car into a better window.
Fourmaux, who missed out on an SS7 stage win by just 0.1s added: “At least we made a step today, so let’s see with other conditions but at least today it was working so I can be smiling.”
Grégoire Munster endured a frustrating Friday where he just couldn’t get his Ford Puma to turn as he wished, lying over 2m30s adrift of the lead after seven stages: “I’m trying – if I keep trying and I bin it, I’ll be the one to blame,” he said. “So we’ll keep working with the guys and see if we can improve anything.”
Things were far worse for team-mate Josh McErlean however, who did bin it on SS3 – suffering a 16G impact on SS3 that caused enough damage to rule the Irishman out for the rest of the weekend. He and co-driver Eoin Treacy received precautionary medical checks and were declared all OK.
Munster is eighth overall with Oliver Solberg ninth and leading the Rally2 class. Alejandro Cachón tops WRC2 and rounds out the top-10; 23.2s adrift of Solberg but leading the category by 12.1s over Nikolay Gryazin. Jan Solans rounds out the top-three in WRC2.
