Elfyn Evans has been handed a 10-second time penalty for not “following the defined roadway” on the final Rally Sweden stage of Saturday.
Evans has been in a fight with Toyota team-mate Kalle Rovanperä for victory for the duration of the rally, trailing by 5.7s ahead of SS15, Umeå.
But he over-committed at the final corner and ran wide and into a soft snowbank right in front of the finish-line, accelerating through it in order to cross the timing beam and set what turned out to be the second-fastest time.
That meant Evans and co-driver Scott Martin were briefly stuck at the side of the road but they did manage to escape, albeit taking to a car park rather than the defined route from the finish to the stop line.
As a result, they deviated from the defined route as per the event’s roadbook and that caught the attention of the Rally Sweden stewards.
Evans, Martin and Toyota’s sporting director Kaj Lindström met with the stewards on Saturday evening, where Martin explained that reversing out of the snowbank “was not possible” and the crew rejoined the defined route “at the earliest possible opportunity as they felt it would not be safe to rejoin the road by driving over the snowbank”.
But Evans was found to be in breach of Article 19.2 of the WRC’s sporting regulations which states that “any deviation” from the “defined roadway” will be “reported to the stewards”.
A stewards’ statement read: “By entering the last corner at high speed, the crew gained a time advantage when crossing the flying finish as the finish line was located just at the exit of the corner.
“Although the crew stopped between the yellow warning sign and the stop sign, the stopping was not intentional and was due to an incident.
“The stewards conclude that this is a breach of Article 19.2 and the time penalty imposed above is proportional under the above circumstances.”
The penalty all but kills the battle for the win, as it extends Rovanperä’s advantage out front from 8.3s to 18.3s.
Instead, Evans is likely to be battling for second place, as Hyundai’s Thierry Neuville is now three seconds adrift of Evans in third while his other team-mate Esapekka Lappi is only another 4.2s adrift of Neuville.
