Solberg has been out front since the second stage on Thursday evening and looked to have everything under control, but a treacherous second pass of La Bréole / Bellaffaire put everyone to the test.
Route note crews had been delayed entering the stage, which only served to complicate matters further as half the Rally1 field made mistakes.
In Solberg’s case he suddenly lost the rear of the car through a sweeping left-hander and ploughed through a fence and into a field. Managing to turn his Toyota around, Solberg gunned it back through the fence and was able to survive.
Remarkably, he still won the stage by 1.9s over Elfyn Evans to hold a 1m04.7s advantage over his Toyota team-mate.
“I don’t know what happened there, but I was so careful through the whole stage,” Solberg said.
“I had ruts in my pacenotes, I was just trying to follow my ruts and on one exit there was full snow and I didn’t know, and I was lucky. Very lucky.”
Evans lost ground to Solberg but has stretched ahead of Sébastien Ogier in their battle for second; now holding a 26.6s advantage over the Frenchman who chose to take it easy.
“I back off,” Ogier explained. “I was not wanting to go for that condition. It was basically undrivable.”
Evans added: “Unbelievable, really unbelievable. You think it’s improving and then you just get this nervous twitch from the car immediately, it’s horrible.
“People always say it’s the worst stage, it’s very close this one…”
Thierry Neuville suffered a spin, remarking: “I was a passenger from the beginning to the end. I had no control.” Team-mate Adrien Fourmaux also put his Hyundai into a pirouette but set the fourth fastest time, as Grégoire Munster went fifth quickest despite a spin of his own.
Munster leapt ahead of Takamoto Katsuta on the stage; the Toyota driver’s navigator Aaron Johnston reading from his phone instead of the pacenote book towards the end of the stage, enabling him to give Katsuta the latest information from the route note crew.
“Aaron did a good job,” Katsuta said. “We didn’t get info from gravel crew, we were missing the last few kilometers, so he did his best and tried to do it [on his phone].”
Hayden Paddon dropped outside the top 10 as he lost over four minutes sliding off the road before spectators pushed him back on again. Sami Pajari crashed out early on the test, running wide into a snowbank and then hitting a tree.
