Pierre-Louis Loubet has retired from Rally Estonia on the first stage of the final morning, breaking his suspension within sight of the service park.
The Tartu Vald stage was far different to the rest of the stages in the Estonia itinerary, based on an airfield just outside the service park rather than out in the fast and flowing forests.
Craig Breen put the point across: “Honestly it’s a horrible stage. Obviously there’s a reason why we’re here, but at 6:54 in the morning I’m not sure who’s watching us. Very different to the other stages,” he said.
If Loubet was initially a fan, he certainly won’t be now after he clipped a rock hidden in the overgrown grass and damaged his front-left suspension.
Climbing out of the car to assess the damage, Loubet wasn’t giving up but aware his error could have grave consequences.
“I don’t know,” he said when asked if it was game over, “we see if we can fix it.”
However upon further inspection, it became clear that he wasn’t going to be able to continue. Fellow M-Sport driver Gus Greensmith will therefore be promoted to eighth. After SS19, he’s just 0.6 seconds behind Loubet on the timesheets.
M-Sport’s other French driver had a far better stage though, gaining 3.2s on Takamoto Katsuta in their fight for fifth.
Fourmaux was actually second fastest of all to narrow his deficit to 7.7s overall, but Katsuta wasn’t concerned by his time loss.
“It’s all OK because I was very, very careful because unfortunately Loubet had some kind of hit,” he explained.
“These kind of things can happen on this sort of stage, but it’s OK I can push on the next ones.”
Rally leader Kalle Rovanperä set the quickest time, stopping the clocks seven tenths faster than Elfyn Evans to increase his lead to 29.8s.
“It was not an enjoyable morning stage to be honest, but we made it through,” he said. “Hopefully we can enjoy the proper stages now.”
Evans has written off his chances of catching Rovanperä, and another time loss on Sunday’s opener only served to prove that this was perhaps the realistic viewpoint.
“Yeah it’s OK, to be honest it was a pretty careful run,” said Evans. “Obviously there’s so many of the stones, it’s hard to know where they are it’s so blind.”
Local driver Ott Tänak was another to not enjoy Tartu Vald, commenting: “It’s just a track, nothing fun in there.”
He was fifth fastest, 3.8s off the pace, to remain third overall.
