Ott Tänak has launched himself into Acropolis Rally podium contention with a strong stage win, as team-mate Thierry Neuville moved from fourth to second at the expense of Pierre-Louis Loubet.
The 20.63-mile Pyrgos stage was a rude awakening for the World Rally Championship’s finest as the second longest stage of the entire season so far. Only Amarante on Rally Portugal was longer.
After six stages on Friday, of which five were single passes, Pyrgos kickstarted a more traditional loop of three stages that will be repeated in the afternoon on Saturday.
Tänak, who confirmed the hybrid unit fitted to his Hyundai was working again after failing on Friday, was electric, going 1.7 seconds faster than anybody else on the stage.
“I tried to push!” he said. “The end was still very loose so this will clean, but the beginning was not so bad with the road position.
“But s*** it was long, it was a never-ending story.”
Tänak’s searing pace was more than enough to lift him ahead of Hyundai team-mate Dani Sordo into fifth place – Sordo surviving a very wide moment on a sweeping hairpin.
“Ott was really fast; I expected this, he made a really good time. As long as he’s our team-mate, it’s fine,” quipped Sordo.
Rally leader Sébastien Loeb was the closest driver to Tänak on SS8 and with M-Sport team-mate Loubet losing time, the nine-time world champion extended his rally lead from 1.7s to a whopping 19s.
“It was very long, very demanding, very tough so it was important to make it without mistake,” Loeb commented.
Loubet dropped 20.4s to the stage winner to slip to third place but didn’t feel he could do more.
“It was very slippery, I was really surprised,” said Loubet. “It’s OK, we did what we can, it was tricky honestly.”
Neuville is now 1.4s ahead and, like Loubet, has gone for two spare tires rather than one on Saturday morning, which he believed was “a bit of a handicap” on SS8. Neuville is betting on it proving to be the right strategy over the course of the loop.
With gaps reverting to three minutes between cars after a last-minute adjustment to four-minute gaps on Friday, Neuville sent a message to the event organizer.
“The dust is again becoming almost an issue,” he said, referencing the major dust problem on Friday’s first stage, “so we should think about this for the next stage where it’s slower and a lot of the time covered by the trees.”
Neuville may have lost 4.7s to his team-mate Tänak, but his efforts were enough for him to vault from fourth to second at the expense of both Loubet and Esapekka Lappi, who dropped 12.5s to Neuville’s Hyundai.
“I cannot do better,” Lappi said, thinly – trailing Neuville by 5.2s overall and now ahead of Tänak by the exact same margin.
Gus Greensmith lost seventh place to Elfyn Evans on Saturday’s opener, ceding 7.1s to his British compatriot to trail by 6.5s.
“I’m struggling a lot with the car when it turns right,” he said, bizarrely, “so it’s making finding a rhythm very difficult.”
Cleaning the road all day on Friday with just one second-pass test and, unusually, no Rally1 retirements had consigned Kalle Rovanperä to a lowly ninth place overnight in Greece.
Based on his Saturday morning pace, things are unlikely to get any better unless any drama ensues ahead.
The world championship leader lost 13.3s to team-mate Evans and 6.2s to Greensmith, leaving him some 40.1s adrift of eighth place.
“This is the maximum pace that I can drive with the car at the moment,” he admitted.
“We did some changes for today, it felt better in the cockpit and the driving in my opinion was quite normal, so I don’t know what else I can do.”
Bouncing back from the disappointment of a puncture on Friday, Craig Breen halved his deficit to 10th-placed Takamoto Katsuta on SS8 – beating the Toyota by 18.1s to trail by 18.3s overall.
“I didn’t expect that,” Breen admitted.
“Bit of dust towards the end, think we took a couple of minutes out of Jourdan [Serderidis], the car felt really nice. No excuses for the boys coming behind, it felt super in there.”
Katsuta has had a trying weekend so far and things didn’t appear much better on Saturday morning: “I don’t feel the grip so it’s really hard,” he said, “not so comfortable.”
