Elfyn Evans and rally retirements are a rare combination.
Consistency has been key to all of his runners-up finishes in the World Rally Championship. But Evans has now retired from the last two events: in Safari Rally Kenya from the right-rear suspension failing after an impact on an earlier stage and now in Croatia, after overshooting a corner and ending up down in the trees.
That naturally raises the question of how Evans’ off occurred. Errors are rare: the last clear example of an unforced retirement is Rally Finland 2024, when he ran wide at the first turn of the event’s penultimate stage and pitched his GR Yaris Rally1 into the trees. So what caused his Croatia off?
“We need to look into it,” Evans told DirtFish. “We’ll have a look after.”
There appeared to be confusion from Evans when he arrived at the corner and he was carrying far too much speed to realistically make the turn.
“It was a bit of a surprise, lets say,” said Evans. “But we need to have a look at it after.”
Once off the road there was little opportunity for Evans to rescue his car and continue – he even resorted to using an axe to chop bits of tree away to free the car.
“I think it would probably have driven out the stage if we could have got it out but you can see from where it is, there was no chance,” said Evans.
“[I am] thankful for the help to get it out [eventually] but realistically no chance to get it out [earlier] unfortunately.”
A potential blow to Evans’ title hopes has been softened significantly by the earlier retirement of Oliver Solberg two stages earlier; reigning world champion Sébastien Ogier also elected to skip Croatia this year, despite being the most recent winner of the rally as a WRC event.
