Elfyn Evans eked out his advantage at the top of the Rally Sweden’s timesheets, where barely half a minute covers the top six drivers as they head to Saturday lunchtime service.
Evans held a 0.6s lead over Toyota team-mate Takamoto Katsuta ahead of the morning stages, which had a layer of fresh snow that had fallen overnight, with Hyundai’s Ott Tänak only 1.9s further back.
The Welshman extended his advantage to 2.8s over Katsuta across the morning, as Thierry Neuville moved into third overall after his team-mates Tänak and Adrien Fourmaux dropped time.
Katsuta cut Evans’s lead to just 0.1s through the opening 9.7-miler at Vännäs. But Evans then topped the times through the fast Sarjöliden test, with Katsuta 1.9s off the pace, and appeared to be enjoying the battle. “It’s always good fun when it’s like this – keeps things interesting,” he smiled.
Evans gained another 0.8s on the new Kolksele stage, despite reckoning it “didn’t feel like a good stage for me”.
He ends the morning 2.8s in front of his team-mate, who complained of understeer. “It’s OK, just need to fix the feeling,” said Katsuta. “Better than last one but still not very good feeling.”
Tänak had greater concerns. Some sort of fluid appeared to be spraying onto his Hyundai’s windshield intermittently during the second and third stages of the morning, where he dropped 9.9s to Evans. While he refused to comment on the issue, he will surely be glad of the lunchtime service.
Fourth overnight, Fourmaux was a little disappointed with his opening effort, 2.8s slower than Evans. He then dropped a further 1.9s on SS10. “We have improved the car, but also the stage is different – it’s much faster now and it seems to be working well on the faster stages. I do two small mistakes where we lose some time, it’s quite frustrating.”
Worse was to come on the final stage of the loop for the Frenchman. Fourmaux was slow off the startline, then stopped altogether while he made some adjustments in-car, dropping around 20s. His pace was unaffected through the rest of the stage, but Fourmaux was clearly bitterly disappointed when he reached the stopline. He has dropped to sixth overall, 31.4s off the pace.
Tänak’s and Fourmaux’s problems opened the door for Thierry Neuville to surge into third overall. While he dropped a few seconds on the loop’s first two stages, he was fastest of all on SS11 and now sits 11.2s off the lead, 8.4s behind second-placed Katsuta and 1.5s ahead of team-mate Tänak.
“Still struggling with the same problem on the first pass with the understeer,” reported Neuville mid-loop, “especially now in mid-corner. I cannot correct my line, so if it’s wrong, I’m bad. So I need to always be a bit slower on the entry and that’s where we are losing the time.”
He added: “Let’s see on the second pass where I think we will be a bit stronger than on first-pass conditions.”
Kalle Rovanperä also moved ahead of Fourmaux into fifth overall, 21.6s off the lead. He was fastest of all on the opener, then only 0.4s slower than Evans on SS10, and second only to Neuville on SS11. But Rovanperä reckoned he was still dropping time. “In the high speed and this kind of place I’m still not so comfortable so I’m not brave enough,” he said.
M-Sport’s Mārtiņš Sesks remains seventh overall, 35.9s behind Fourmaux. The Toyota of Sami Pajari has risen to seventh, another 13.3s back, and was third fastest of all on SS11 where earlier runners benefited from less snowbank debris.
Pajari’s gain was at Josh McErlean’s expense. The Irishman dropped a few seconds with a small mistake on SS10 but otherwise had a clean morning. He is now 10.1s behind Pajari but still 25.6s clear of team-mate Grégoire Munster, who was hampered by running second on the road.
In WRC2, Oliver Solberg still holds a healthy advanatge of 28.5s over Roope Korhonen after winning two of the morning’s three stages.
Mikko Heikkilä moved into third position among the points-scoring drivers after reporting a much better feeling on his Škoda Fabia, but Georg Linnamäe and Tuukka Kauppinen both dropped out of contention.
Costly excursions into snowbanks on SS10 cost Linnamäe five minutes and Kauppinen 15 minutes.
