Adrien Forumaux’s hopes of a maiden World Rally Championship victory on Acropolis Rally Greece have been dashed, hitting a rock that broke his Ford Puma’s front-right wheel.
Coming through a narrow right-hander in the forest, Fourmaux clipped a rock embedded in a bank next to the road, sending his Puma up into the air and landing heavily.
Fourmaux continued to drive a few hundred yards further down the road but eventually parked up when his car struggled to turn into a right-hander. Both he and co-driver Alex Coria climbed out to check the front-right corner and did not attempt to get going again.
Before stage four Fourmaux had been battling with Sébstien Ogier for the rally lead, ending the morning loop only 5.9s adrift of the eight-time world champion despite not having any hybrid boost since midway through the first stage of the rally.
There had even been an element of luck in Fourmaux making it to the afternoon loop. An impact with a rock earlier on Friday morning had penetrated his Puma’s sump guard, with M-Sport electing to change it at midday service along with the hybrid system.
“Fortunately, he got through the stages without losing any time, but it probably wouldn’t have gone much further,” M-Sport manning director Malcolm Wilson confirmed to DirtFish.
Fourmaux was lucky to survive the morning loop after transmission damage sustained on the rally's opening test
Ogier now holds an 11.7-second lead over Ott Tänak, who leads a trio of Hyundai i20 N Rally1s.
Dani Sordo was promoted to third place by Forumaux’s demise but he revealed that he had also been suffering from a similar hybrid issue to the M-Sport driver.
“We won our category, no? Fourmaux was stopped, so we are livid,” Sordo said at the end of Ano Pavliani.
“My hybrid is not working. It’s nothing related to my car, Hyundai is working very well, but the hybrid people [Compact Dynamics] need to check. The car works nice, the engine is nice, but this is them, they need to check a little bit, like this it starts to not work and you don’t know why. It broke our rally a little bit.”
Championship leader Thierry Neuville continues to struggle with road sweeping duties but with Fourmaux’s demise, plus Takamoto Katsuta’s earlier retirement and Elfyn Evans dropping several minutes on Friday morning with a broken turbo, he’s already up to fourth place.
Neuville’s own technical problems from Friday morning, where his i20 N Rally1’s engine was misfiring, were also remedied at service: “The car was working like it should so thank you to the team for fixing it.
“[There were] no lines, so not much we could do. Some corners were a disaster. I don’t even touch the hard surface underneath.”
Yohan Rossel is already up to fifth place overall in addition to dominating the WRC2 category. He is still ahead of Grégoire Munster in sixth place, as the M-Sport driver was given a 20-second penalty for being two minutes late out of service.
WRC2 title contender Sami Pajari is now 33.9s behind Rossel: “I feel like there is something which is slowing us down a little bit, so we need to investigate,” he reported at the end of SS4.
