Ott Tänak has nibbled another chunk out of Craig Breen’s Rally Sweden lead as a messy stage for Elfyn Evans dropped him behind Thierry Neuville into sixth.
Heading into the afternoon Breen’s lead stood at exactly three seconds – the Hyundai driver gaining a meagre 0.4 seconds over the course of the morning.
But Tänak turned the tables on him on the first stage of the afternoon (which Breen was quicker on in the morning) as Breen was as much as 2.4s down on Tänak in the first split.
However, a strong second half of the stage allowed him to reduce his stage deficit to 1.3s, but that means Breen’s rally lead is just 1.7s.
“I got caught in a snowbank near the start, quite lucky to get out of it. It would have been a silly one, just dropped a bit of momentum but other than that fine.”
Tänak, unaware of the time he had gained, added: ““It’s a long loop, it will be a long loop, so we need to manage through it.”
Thierry Neuville had looked to have jumped past Evans into fifth on the final stage before midday service before times were readjusted due to a small error, but Evans made that task easy for Neuville with a mistake on SS12.
Running through a narrow right-hander, Evans smacked a snowbank on the exit with the rear of his Toyota with enough force that his GR Yaris Rally1 was pitched round 180-degrees – the front digging into the snow.
He then made another similar mistake later on the stage where he essentially bounced and rode off a snowbank but got away without spinning or being sucked in.
It meant he lost 18.4s to Neuville to drop to sixth by 17.4s.
“I just lost the rear on the way in and couldn’t recover it,” Evans explained.
It was a better stage for team-mate Kalle Rovanperä though as he won it and continued to apply the pressure on third-placed Esapekka Lappi.
Lappi set the same time as his Hyundai team-mate Neuville, one second down on Rovanperä, to see his overall advantage trimmed to 9.5s.
“It was clean, very clean,” said Lappi. “The start was very bad, I think I chose the wrong line I had a lot of wheelspin but otherwise all good.”
