Elfyn Evans snatched his first stage win of Rally Estonia on Sunday morning’s opening stage to set up a battle for third place with Toyota team-mate Sébastien Ogier.
If Evans had any demons from the Arula stage, he well and truly shook them off with a strong run on the test that features the infamous jump that broke his back in 2019 and ruled him out of two WRC rounds.
At just 4.33 miles, the test is the shortest and fastest of the rally, but Evans still made good gains.
“Yeah, no drama. It was quite OK,” Evans insisted. Arguably it was more than OK, as he swiped 2.3 seconds from Ogier to close to just 5.8s away from his team-mate’s on Sunday as opposed to one to cover their backs for all eventualities.
Takamoto Katsuta has a difficult task on his hands to maintain fifth place and keep Kalle Rovanperä behind following the latter’s one-minute penalty on Saturday evening. Rovanperä started Sunday with 33 seconds to make up across six stages and began as he meant to go on, narrowing it to 29.7s.
With longer stages coming up, this battle could go down to the wire.
Good morning DirtFish rally friends. @voiceofrally has been out to have a look at today’s stage conditions pic.twitter.com/ZCmM2NC2oP
— dirtfishrally (@DirtFishRally) September 6, 2020
M-Sport Ford pilots Esapekka Lappi and Teemu Suninen both made a somewhat depressing pre-rally prediction: stating that they expected to only be fighting themselves with the Hyundai and Toyota factory cars out of reach.
That’s exactly the situation they find themselves in, split by 9.2s in seventh and eighth before the start of the day with Lappi in the ascendancy.
“I really tried to be on it,” reflected Suninen, “[we] can’t do much better now.” His team-mate Lappi certainly couldn’t do better either, losing 1.5s to Suninen to narrow the gap down to 7.7s.
“I don’t know to be honest, I’m not too much concentrated on that,” Lappi said of a brewing battle with Suninen. “I would just like to get more speed today.”
Thierry Neuville was back out after his retirement early on Saturday afternoon, but driving slowly. This time however it was a choice rather than a necessity, as Neuville elected to leave plenty in reserve so as to preserve the life of his tires – with no service break on Sunday – for the event-concluding powerstage in an attempt to salvage as many points from Rally Estonia as possible.
Despite completing the Arula test in a sub-four minute time, Neuville was still 22.6s off the next slowest time of Pierre-Louis Loubet, who is ninth overall on his first world championship event in a Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC.
Gus Greensmith remains tucked behind Loubet in 10th, 45.1s in arrears.
SS12 times
1 Evans (Toyota) 3m15.3s
2 Rovanperä (Toyota) +0.4s
3 Tänak (Hyundai) +1.6s
4 Ogier (Toyota) +2.3s
5 Breen (Hyundai) +3s
Leading positions after SS12
1 Tänak (Hyundai) 1h18m25.3s
2 Breen (Hyundai) +13.1s
3 Ogier (Toyota) +29.4s
4 Evans (Toyota) +35.2s
5 Katsuta (Toyota) +1m04s
6 Rovanperä (Toyota) +1m33.7s
7 Lappi (M-Sport Ford) +1m45.2s
8 Suninen (M-Sport Ford) +1m52.9s
9 Loubet (2C Competition Hyundai) +2m25.6s
10 Greensmith (M-Sport Ford) +3m10.7s
