Rally Portugal threw up plenty of surprises for the drivers: some stages were slicker than expected on Friday, rougher than expected on Saturday and looser than expected on Sunday. And yet, through all the curveballs, 11 of the 12 Rally1 runners made it to the finish.
But as any seasoned rally fan knows, the final classification rarely tells the full story. Scratch beneath the surface and there’s more to tell. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
How did the drivers really fare in Portugal? The DirtFish media team’s driver rankings (of the works cars) take a deeper dive.
11 Grégoire Munster
European gravel is the foundation of the World Rally Championship. Portugal is the quintessential WRC event; not as fast as the Scandinavian events, not quite as technical and rocky as Sardinia or Greece. It is the closest thing to a universal baseline at world level. It’s the sort of event you need to be able to turn a decent performance on to thrive across a whole season.
Munster is the de facto team leader at M-Sport, being the only driver in the Cumbrian squad with a full season’s worth of Rally1 experience under his belt. The awkward reality is his Portugal performance did not reflect that.
Early doors he was vying for position with rookie team-mate Josh McErlean but on Saturday he made a mistake from which he couldn’t recover when it came to the intra-team duel: he’d fiddled with his set-up too much on Friday evening service, making the car too stiff, and started bleeding time to McErlean. At the same service, the Irishman had opted to change almost nothing, instead focusing on improving his driving rather than the car – a strategy that paid dividends.
Munster brought the car home without any major errors, which is a good start. But he was bested by a rookie team-mate on pace alone, on a rally which best represents the idea of an ‘average’ WRC event, which doesn’t bode well. Although it must be said Munster was lacking experience of the event compared to McErlean, and most other drivers.
10 Elfyn Evans
Being championship leader comes with an unfortunate cross to bear: sweeping away loose gravel as the first car on the road. Expecting Evans to fight at the sharp end for victory would be asking too much of anyone. But, as his own team-mate Sébastien Ogier will tell you from experience, title runs are built on making the most out of a bad hand.
Friday wasn’t great: he was 40.7s slower than Rovanperä, who started directly behind him on the first proper day of action. But Saturday is where his lack of pace was laid bare: he was 10s slower than rookie team-mate Sami Pajari, who started only one place behind him on the road. By this point he’d ceded just shy of two minutes to Rovanperä.
On Sunday there was a slight uptick in pace as he experimented with his approach to driving – though exactly what that meant remains elusive for now. The road cleaning effect was extremely pronounced on the final day, so expecting a big haul of Sunday points was a tough ask. But the reason he was so far down the order by that point was through his earlier performance: he’d compromised his own opportunity to make amends, as Thierry Neuville did with his Sunday seven-pointer. Neuville, remember, was only two cars behind Evans on Saturday.
Beyond road position there were no mitigating circumstances. Picking up nine points while your nearest rival, who started one place behind you on the road, gets 22, is not conducive to winning a world title. And the part of this which will weigh heavily on Evans’ mind is that there’s plenty more of this exact scenario on the horizon with Sardinia and Greece next.
At their current relative rates of return, Rovanperä would be almost level-pegging in the title race by the time WRC reaches the fast gravel rallies.
9 Mārtiņš Sesks
It’s sometimes hard to align perception with likely reality when it comes to Sesks. On paper, looking at his rise up the ranks, he’s an unpolished talent that needs plenty of seat time to fine-tune his potential at the top level. And that was his aim in Portugal: rack up mileage, get a better feeling for the Ford Puma and build on that experience. Which, broadly speaking, he did.
While his headline-grabbing outings in Poland and Latvia last year effectively clinched him this part-time opportunity with M-Sport on gravel rounds, it’s also a curse for which he’ll be measured up against by the general public, while not really being in a position to hit those highs again – at least not until potentially Estonia and Finland. He accrued the mileage and experimented extensively with car setup – but his pace varied fairly substantially across the weekend.
Whacking the same bank as Neuville on the second pass of Mortágua pirouetted his Puma and dented his confidence somewhat, backing off for the remainder of Friday thereafter – a day that had earlier been ruined by a puncture. His Saturday was much better, keeping up with McErlean across the day’s action, though on Sunday he was the slowest M-Sport driver (Diogo Salvi aside, who doesn’t count).
8 Takamoto Katsuta
Katsuta was able to leverage his road position early on, climbing his way from sixth to second as he battled with Ogier on Friday’s second loop of stages. But that second pass of Portuguese classics – Lousã, Góis and Arganil – was the only time all weekend he looked truly content at the wheel of his GR Yaris.
The rest of the time there was an edge of frustration, as once the assurance of predictable grip left him on Saturday, his driving rhythm – and by extension stage times – fell backwards accordingly.
The most egregious offence of his rally was not really his fault, rather it was down to Toyota’s lack of forward planning: he stopped his own team from scoring an additional point in the manufacturers’ championship by finishing the powerstage directly ahead of Ogier. Because Katsuta wasn’t registered to score points this week, it effectively ‘blocked’ Ogier from taking the final point on offer for Toyota.
We saw another flash of pace that suggests deep down Katsuta has the pace to run at the front – but once again, it couldn’t be sustained across the course of an entire rally.
7 Adrien Fourmaux
A hard one to judge given the small sample size of stages to judge him by. He was battling Tänak – who proved to be the outright fastest driver of the rally – for the lead early doors, only for a suspension bracket to crack and strand him on the Arganil stage.
When it comes to pace alone, his brief cameo at the front was strong, leveraging his road order advantage well. But there’s a caveat to all of this: his suspension breaking wasn’t an incident purely in isolation. He’d whacked something hard earlier in the stage which cracked the bracket that eventually failed, which then snapped entirely with the lighter impact against bedrock at the corner where he retired.
But again, that has its own caveat: Hyundai has its back against a wall. Leaving margin and being safe when you’re trailing substantially in both title races doesn’t work as a strategy – you have to be bold and take risks to close the gap. Fourmaux did and suffered the consequences.
Starting first on the road with the road cleaning so aggressively on Sunday left him unable to repeat his Rally Islas Canarias recovery drive or Safari Rally Kenya 10-pointer, and Hyundai subsequently elected to retire his car so he left Portugal with nothing.
6 Thierry Neuville
Seven points on the final day suggested Neuville had extracted the pace available to him by the end of the weekend, considering the car underneath him and his road position at the time.
The problem, like Evans but less pronounced, was Friday morning set him back to a position from which he couldn’t fully recover. Clattering a bank and spinning out, struggling to find grip on the morning loop as a whole left him fifth after the first proper day of action.
Had he been 5.6s further up the road on Friday – less than the time lost with his stage two trip into a bank and subsequent spin – he’d have ended day two in third, and had a much better road position for the next two days. Considering Rovanperä was able to cut his gap to Ogier in half at one point before his own pace dropped off, Neuville would have been in the box seat to mount a charge. And his driving on Sunday when faced with less-than-ideal conditions suggested he could have leveraged that opportunity.
He did well with the situation he faced – but that set of circumstances was also partially his own making.
5 Sami Pajari
It was a calm, clean, unexceptional performance from Pajari – which is exactly the point. After stuffing his Yaris into an armco barrier and damaging it so badly he couldn’t super-rally on the final day of Islas Canarias, Pajari’s one and only goal in Portugal was clear: do all the mileage and demonstrate a solid but well-controlled pace. He did that. And he did it while besting championship leader Evans on Saturday.
When Evans attempted to turn up the wick on Sunday he finally surrendered a position and dropped to seventh place. But the reality is he didn’t even try to defend the position – pushing to keep your senior team-mate behind and risking an incident would have been foolhardy.
4 Kalle Rovanperä
It felt like Sweden all over again. Right from the start, Rovanperä warned us that he was struggling to get to grips with the Hankooks and that he’d be up against it. His complaints were a near-mirror image of those from his best mate in rallying, Katsuta: grip had left the chat. There were difficulties getting the Yaris turned into corners.
But, as is often the mark of a world champion, he salvaged a strong result out of it. Starting second the road meant he faced some of the worst sweeping conditions on the marathon 10-stage Friday itinerary, yet he still got to the other end of it in the thick of the battle for a podium place.
His struggles to extract performance from the Hankook tire continued throughout the weekend and, a stunning run on the first pass of Paredes aside, he had no answer to Tänak’s Hyundai on the final day to keep hold of second.
To feel ill at ease with the car, the tire, and having to start second on the road, yet finishing the rally with 22 points in your pocket, is the kind of result title runs are made of. Even if Rovanperä remains ill-at-ease aboard his Yaris on the upcoming gravel rounds, more performances like this will be enough to erase his difficult start to the year.
3 Josh McErlean
Despite being the least experienced driver in the M-Sport lineup with the Ford Puma on gravel (again, Salvi excepted) he was the fastest and most convincing driver in a purple machine.
Yes, he finished the rally five minutes off the pace. More than half of that was when he was high up the road order on the final two days, though, which means reading into that number too aggressively would be a mistake.
What really impressed, beyond being the top M-Sport driver, was his approach. McErlean knew Portugal was the first event he’d have a good chance of strutting his stuff, based on his form there a year ago in WRC2. But he refused to let himself get carried away with that notion, didn’t push too hard when he felt the car wasn’t reacting exactly as he hoped on the Friday, and bided his time learning the car’s behaviour.
“To trust it the last bit, I don’t have it at the moment and you can see where the time is going,” he said on Mortágua’s second pass. “But you can’t rush it yet.”
As the rally wore on he built his confidence and speed, eventually establishing himself as the clear pacesetter in the M-Sport camp. Refusing to fiddle too much with the setup and instead look within himself to unlock more pace was another promising indicator of his confidence building.
Portugal was, by far, his best outing in Rally1 so far.
2 Sébastien Ogier
It’s a cliché, yes. But when dealing with eight-time world champions you tend to run out of original verbiage anyway, So, enjoy this classic: form is temporary, class is permanent.
Ogier struggled out there. On Rally Islas Canarias, he indicated his age was making him reassess his approach to risk-taking. In Portugal, the long slog and lack of subsequent recovery time was pushing his body beyond what it could comfortably handle – and as he suggested to DirtFish while sat on the side of the road, he’s no longer the elite athlete he was when in his championship-winning pomp.
But the wily old fox – sorry Séb, you’re the only regular Rally1 driver in your 40s, that’s your domain now! – showed the (slightly) young(er) ones how it’s done yet again. Tänak and Fourmaux were rapid but they were also boxed in, forced to take additional risk with a car that was known to be less robust than Séb’s Toyota. He pushed hard – but not so hard it made his car fall to bits, only enough that it forced the Hyundais to react. He was patient and waited for the rally to evolve in his favor. That patience was eventually rewarded.
This is Ogier’s fourth season as a part-timer. He’s never contested a full season during the Rally1 era. Yet here he remains, the driver Toyota can depend on to go out there and spearhead a manufacturers’ title challenge.
He’s missed two rounds but is only two points shy of Rovanperä. Would Toyota be the same force without him in its roster? Despite the GR Yaris having been the benchmark car of the current regulation cycle, the answer would likely still be no.
1 Ott Tänak
Do you remember this guy? We saw him in 2019 pretty frequently. And there was that one time in Finland a couple of years back.
Ott Tänak was on another planet in Portugal. If you gave him a notional time equivalent to Ogier for stages 17 and 18 – which he had to limp through with broken power steering – he’d have won the rally by over 40 seconds. And scored maximum points to boot.
He said that on Sunday he’d decided to either return to service “with second place or the steering wheel”. Taking maximum Sunday points and being the fastest driver on the final day by 12s suggested this wasn’t an exaggeration on Ott’s part.
After complaints last year, the FIA changed the points system to make it less likely that the rally winner would be outscored. Tänak nearly did it – he only scored one point fewer than Ogier, even with a rally win being worth eight points more than second place.
You could argue the power steering failure was self-inflicted from pushing so hard on Amarante, a stage littered with loose rocks and holes. He was taking big risks. But if you ask F-X Demaison – recently a more prolific spokesperson for Hyundai’s WRC effort than team principal Cyril Abiteboul – those risks had to be taken. And when a fired up Tänak feels at one with his car, there is no one in this world who can stop him. Not even Ogier.
