M-Sport team principal Richard Millener has no plans to instruct Mārtiņš Sesks to take a specific approach to the final day of Rally Saudi Arabia, even with a first World Rally Championship victory in two years on the line.
Sesks has been the surprise package of Rally Saudi Arabia, fighting for the lead since the start of the rally. He briefly retook the lead from Adrien Fourmaux on Friday afternoon, lost it again with a left-rear puncture on SS14 – only to then be reinstated to the lead when Fourmaux picked up a one-minute early check-in penalty at TC14A.
M-Sport’s last victory in the WRC was Rally Chile in 2023 with Ott Tänak; its last podium was with Fourmaux at last year’s season finale, Rally Japan. With a recently rare chance of silverware on the line, Millener has only one suggestion for Sesks: don’t overdrive and keep going as you were.
“He just needs to go and do what he wants to do,” Millener told DirtFish.
“The only thing he doesn’t need to do is overdrive it. You don’t want to just have an accident for the sake of it.
“He’s proven this weekend, this position hasn’t been inherited in any way. He had a good road position on day one, but he made use of it like anybody else would if they came in and had a road position. Even multiple world champions that have good roads positions at the start of a rally, you’ve still got to make use of it, which he did, and then he’s genuinely kept the pace against everybody else over the whole weekend.
“If he goes sensible then there’s no reason why he can’t actually be on top of Adrien and Thierry anyway. He’s been beating them over the rest of the weekend already, so it’s just about keeping within that really good window that he’s been in for the last two days.”
A two-way battle for the win has formed with three stages remaining; Sesks has Thierry Neuville’s Hyundai i20 N Rally1 only 3.4s behind him.
That’s in stark contrast to only one stage earlier, where Sesks had been 22.1s up on Fourmaux prior to his puncture – one that he said he’d been trying hard to avoid.
“I was trying to be really, really safe on the last one, seeing all the things with the punctures and so on,” said Sesks. “But somehow we got the puncture – it was immediately on the rear, there was a hit where I didn’t see anything.”
Sesks warned that even if he held back from any temptation to overdrive the car, punctures remained a risk anyway.
Asked if he was leaving any pace in reserve, Sesks replied: “It’s hard to say because you’re then being safe as I was on stage 14, you get the puncture, then you’re risking it all having broken rims but still going in the stage.
“I don’t know what the best approach is.”
Sesks’ best finish in the WRC is currently fifth (Rally Poland 2024), but he was set to finish third in Latvia last year before a technical problem on the powerstage.
