Kalle Rovanperä is one day away from a first Rally Finland win, with the Toyota team locking out the top-five positions after Saturday.
Rovanperä has been in complete control of his home event across Saturday’s eight stages, converting an overnight lead of 4.7 seconds into an advantage of 36.1s.
However the Finn was given a helping hand as both Hyundai’s Thierry Neuville and Adrien Fourmaux picked up front-right punctures on the second stage of the afternoon.
Each driver lost over 1m30s and therefore plummeted down from second and third to sixth and seventh respectively.
Fourmaux then elected to back off as “the rally is over now”, while Neuville kept up the tempo but admitted things were getting to him.
“It’s getting tough,” he said. “I rarely give up but at some point I have no force to keep pushing. This year, the first part of the season, there’s no reward.”
As for Rovanperä, he’s just two runs of Ouninpohja away from a long-awaited Finland win; but is well aware of the jeopardy after his unfortunate retirement last year.
“It’s quite a big day for the team, so I just try to keep the good pace up,” Rovanperä said. “I have the feeling we have to go quite fast tomorrow, Hyundais will probably be super fast and my team-mates will be fast also so we try and get some good points.”
Takamoto Katsuta is the closest driver to Rovanperä, 6.8s ahead of a thrilling scrap between Sébastien Ogier and Elfyn Evans.
Ogier is currently ahead, but only has 1.5s between himself and fourth-placed EEvans. Sami Pajari is fifth and had been keeping tabs with his more experienced team-mates, but dropped to 16.3s behind by the end of the day after going “steadily through” the final two stages of the day.
Josh McErlean is now the leading M-Sport driver in eighth place after Mãrtiņš Sesks was forced to stop on SS15 with a misted-up windshield. The Latvian lost two minutes, despite the best efforts of co-driver Renārs Francis who attempted to clean it with a cloth on his foot.
Grégoire Munster lost valuable time to his team-mate McErlean with the responsibility of opening the road – ending the leg 0.4s shy of a minute behind in ninth. Sesks is 10th place overnight.
After his five-minute time penalty, awarded for an incident with a steward on Friday, Ott Tänak is well outside the top-10 places, but was also beset by a puncture like his team-mates.
Roope Korhonen leads a big fight in WRC2 by just 1.8s over Jari-Matti Latvala.
The Toyota team principal has been chipping away at his fellow Toyota-driving Finn across the afternoon but didn’t quite manage to nip ahead. Robert Virves is third; aided by Georg Linnamäe ripping a rear wheel off his Yaris.
