Esapekka Lappi is struggling to find positives from Rally Estonia after a puncture on Saturday morning demoted him to seventh, an occurrence he says has parallels to his crash from the lead on Rally Italy earlier in the year.
After his podium on Rally Sweden in February, Lappi has run into trouble on all of his outings for Toyota since while driving the third car shared with reigning world champion Sébastien Ogier.
In Croatia he clipped a rock on the opening day and retired, and on Saturday morning in Estonia he debeaded a tire after running wide, which he had to stop and change mid-stage.
To compound his misery, there was also a problem with the jack on his Toyota GR Yaris, delaying his tire change further.
After a problem straight out of the gate on Friday morning, where he reported issues finding bite from his brake pads that left him off the pace of Toyota team-mates Kalle Rovanperä and Elfyn Evans from the get-go, Lappi was despondent that his pre-event preparations had come to little once again.
“It’s just when, a bit like in Sardinia, you are doing things right, you are preparing well, you are really concentrating and doing all the hard work and then some bad luck hits you,” he told DirtFish.
“That’s how I felt in Sardinia and how I feel now as well. It’s just a bit pushing down the feeling. Maybe better luck is still waiting for me in the future.”
Despite his low mood Lappi still felt his pace has been reasonable during the day, even if a strong result was no longer in the offing.
“I think the driving itself has been OK. There has been a few bad stages but generally it’s not been too bad.”
Lappi is 41.5 seconds adrift of sixth-placed Adrien Fourmaux with only 48.45 miles of competitive stage miles to cover on Sunday, making a push to catch the lead M-Sport driver unlikely to succeed.
