Sébastien Ogier leads Rally Finland after Friday morning’s loop which claimed both Jon Armstrong and Esapekka Lappi, and caught out Thierry Neuville.
Adrien Fourmaux led the event by 1.1 seconds after Thursday evening’s Harju stage, but it was fellow Frenchman Ogier who won the first forest test: Laukaa.
Finding 2.9s over anyone else, Ogier shot into the lead and set about defending that across the rest of the four-stage loop.
Sami Pajari proved to be Ogier’s biggest intra-team challenger; the Finn setting the pace on SS3 by 1.6s to climb from seventh to third behind erstwhile leader Fourmaux.
Pajari then cleared Fourmaux on SS4 Sydänmaa – one of two brand-new stages on Friday – but couldn’t match Ogier, whose half-second stage win moved him into a 4.5s advantage.
Co-driven by Julien Ingrassia again with Vincent Landais missing the event for personal reasons, Ogier was inspired on the new Hoho stage – beating Pajari by 3.5s to extend the gap to exactly eight.
“I pushed pretty hard and there was some little moment where I was on the edge of the road,” Ogier confessed. “We pushed every stage this morning.”
Fourmaux moved back ahead of Pajari on SS5, losing just half a second to Ogier and ending the loop 5.3s off the lead – 2.7s ahead of Pajari.
“It’s been a great morning, but I would like more,” Fourmaux said. “The grip is changing a lot and I’m a bit struggling to improve my driving, but I’m still definitely enjoying it.”
Fourmaux’s two Hyundai team-mates didn’t have such great mornings, despite showing strong speed.
Neuville had been fourth, just one second behind Fourmaux before he lost 1m45s on SS5, damaging the front-left corner of his Hyundai.
Explaining what happened, Neuville said: “Just a little bit fast pacenotes, I had to throw the car and there was a stone on the outside, it turned me around and it hit obviously something.”
Neuville limped through the stage and dropped well outside the top 10.
Lappi had been an early fifth overall but rolled just 800 meters onto SS4 – carrying too much speed and ending on his roof.
Lappi's Friday ended badly
M-Sport’s Armstrong was the other casualty of the loop, running wide on SS3, clipping something in the undergrowth and going off into a ditch where he was stuck.
Oliver Solberg admitted things had been “a little bit more difficult than I expected this morning” as he fought to find the magic feeling aboard his Toyota, but he did move ahead of team-mate
Elfyn Evans into fourth place on SS5 after Evans ran wide on the exit of a corner through some bushes.
The pair are respectively 11.8s and 14.1s shy of Ogier’s lead.
Takamoto Katsuta is sixth but 27.4s off the lead after struggling all morning with understeer.
“I’m struggling so much,” he said. “It was just the wrong way to go so I have to find something. Obviously something is completely wrong – so bad. It’s just so difficult to drive at the moment.”
Mãrtiņš Sesks is 6.5s behind Katsuta in seventh, with M-Sport team-mate Josh McErlean 16.9s adrift in eighth.
