Craig Breen leads Rally Sweden at the end of Friday but dropped another 3.8 seconds to Ott Tänak to hold a very narrow lead.
Breen took the lead from Tänak at the start of afternoon after a sensational stage time that was 7.8s quicker than anybody else.
He then boosted his lead to 10.5s after SS6 but Tänak hit back on Friday’s penultimate test to slim Breen’s lead to 6.4s.
The trend continued on SS8 as Breen lost another 3.8s to see his lead trimmed to just 2.6s heading into Saturday.
“At this point last year I was usually upside down or stuck in a hedge somewhere, so it’s very nice music to my ears to be leading the rally. The enjoyment that you have on days like this, it might even be the same level of a buzz I get out of a historic car – not quite above it but very close.”
Tänak added: “Result wise definitely we can be quite happy. It’s for sure much more than we expected coming here but in this case it’s quite good, but the thing is we can be a lot better.”
Esapekka Lappi is in a small slice of no man’s land in third place; 8.6s adrift of second-placed Tänak and 15.3s ahead of Elfyn Evans.
Evans struggled with the balance of his Toyota in the morning but had a better afternoon – only for a wild run on the final Umeå Sprint stage to leave him a little frustrated.
He ended the day as the top Toyota in fourth overall, 4.5s up on his world champion team-mate Kalle Rovanperä who suffered badly as the first car on the road but won Umeå Sprint, just as he had the previous evening.
Thierry Neuville’s day was dogged by understeer – not helped by losing parts of his bumper in both the morning and afternoon loop.
The Hyundai driver, who was feeling a bit better after struggling with illness, ended Friday just 5.7s behind Rovanperä.
Pierre-Louis Loubet is another 39.4s behind and 1m16.2s down on the rally leader Breen; an overshoot on the final stage of the day not helping his cause.
But the M-Sport Ford driver’s mission is to avoid trouble and mistakes and so far he’s succeeded in both.
Oliver Solberg leads WRC2 by 13 seconds overnight over Toksport Škoda team-mate Sami Pajari.
