Takamoto Katsuta won the final stage of Friday morning but it’s Ott Tänak who continues to lead Rally Sweden over Hyundai duo Craig Breen and Esapekka Lappi.
Kalle Rovanperä led the rally after Thursday’s opening stage but was immediately overhauled by M-Sport’s Ott Tänak as Friday’s action got underway – even if it was Hyundai returnee Craig Breen that was fastest.
The world champion lost 12.5 seconds to Breen’s fastest time as he struggled with running as the first car onto the stages, but as the morning progressed (and the surface of the stages transitioned more from predominantly snow to predominantly ice) Rovanperä began to turn the tide.
Fastest on the middle stage of the loop to close to 4.9s behind Tänak’s lead, Rovanperä was again quicker on SS4 – albeit by just 0.2s.
“Probably we should be faster, he’s definitely cleaning,” Tänak said.
“It should be better, at the moment it’s not so easy for sure.”
Rovanperä added: “Definitely these two were better than the first one but this one again was really tough to open the road.
“I tried to push and be clean. On the fast parts where it’s clean I could be fast but you lose time at the junctions and these places because you have no traction.”
The world champion wasn’t the fastest driver through the stage though – that honor belonging to his Toyota team-mate Katsuta.
“It’s very, very high speed and I feel comfortable with the car,” Katsuta said. “Quite OK, just very smooth.”
Katsuta is fifth overall, 7.1s shy of the rally lead on his first weekend as a fully-fledged Toyota works driver.
Tänak’s rally lead stands at 2.1s over Breen who extended his advantage over team-mate Lappi to exactly two seconds. Rovanperä is just 0.6s shy of the podium.
It’s been a deeply impressive first morning back in an i20 for Breen though, who lost just 0.7s to the fastest time on SS4.
“I was very close to missing the braking at one junction, had to literally drive into a snowbank to slow down. But no drama.”
Elfyn Evans and Thierry Neuville are falling out of the battle at the front; Evans overhauling Neuville for sixth on SS4 but lying 15.5s off the lead.
He said he was “struggling to just find confidence in the balance overall” while Neuville was a little mystified to lose 7.3s on the stage.
“I had a good stage to be honest – if I lost time I don’t know where.”
Pierre-Louis Loubet meanwhile is firmly into no man’s land, 20s adrift of Neuville. But that’s OK as his mission is simply to get through the rally cleanly and make no mistakes.
Oliver Solberg is ninth overall and at the head of the WRC2 field, leading Sami Pajari by 6.8s after an impressive run from the 2021 Junior WRC champion on SS4 to win the test and vault from fifth to second.
Teemu Suninen dropped to third, 8.2s off the lead while Ole Christian Veiby is another 1.9s behind.
