Takamoto Katsuta got sucked into a snowbank and rolled on the fifth stage of Rally Sweden as Craig Breen stormed into the lead with a blistering time.
Katsuta had won the first stage before service to close to 7.1 seconds off the rally lead in fifth, but his rally unravelled on the first, and deeply rutted, stage of the afternoon.
The Toyota driver smacked a snowbank with the rear right of his GR Yaris Rally1 and the snowbank took its revenge, pulling Katsuta in and rolling the car over.
Katsuta made it to the end of the stage but dropped over 40s, and the car looked rather sorry for itself at stage-end.
Things were far better for Hyundai driver Breen though, who set the pace on the first pass of Brattby.
Running further back on the road proved to be an advantage but Breen took that advantage and hammered it home, beating second-fastest Pierre-Louis Loubet (the car ahead of him on the road) by 7.8s.
That, unsurprisingly, moved Breen into a 7.7s lead over Ott Tänak – and Breen was so ecstatic with his run he was laughing!
https://twitter.com/DirtFishRally/status/1624049325201362949?s=20&t=oXYsjXHyp2ya6uOZKAe8gQ
“The car is on absolute rails, I’ve never had anything like that before,” he said. “More of that please yeah.”
Esapekka Lappi is 10.5s behind his team-mate, closing to 2.8s behind Tänak too.
“It’s quite a big contrast to the first pass, but this is Sweden!” Lappi said. “Shaking quite a lot, ruts are quite deep but yeah no mistakes.”
Kalle Rovanperä had suffered the most with road cleaning on the Brattby stage that kickstarted the loop, and the same proved true in the afternoon.
His stage time was 21.3s slower than fastest and he therefore lost to his Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans.
But his sense of humor hadn’t deserted him.
“Just before the stage I got a message that traction has left the chat,” Rovanperä said.
“There was not much I could do. I could barely survive the stage – definitely it’s going to be a big, big time loss for us.”
Evans climbed from sixth to fourth, leading his team-mate by just four tenths.
Thierry Neuville meanwhile arrived to the end of SS5 minus half of his Hyundai’s front bumper; the legacy of a wild moment where Neuville rode along a snowbank after bouncing out the ruts of a left hander.
“It’s worse than any other year,” said Neuville of the second-pass conditions.
“It’s so loose in there and the ruts are very, very deep so you just try to survive. It was very physical in there, you have to steer a lot.”
