M-Sport Ford team principal Richard Millener feels there are parallels between Jon Armstrong’s accident at Rally Chile and incidents in Portugal and Paraguay, with pacenotes the root cause.
Armstrong has impressed with his speed throughout his maiden Rally1 season in 2026, claiming a WRC stage win in Greece. But since then, the positives have evaporated with errors in each of the four events.
The 31-year-old was under strict instruction to get through this week’s Rally Chile without incident, but despite adopting a safe approach – carrying two spare tires on Friday with all the other Rally1 drivers choosing just one – Armstrong carried too much speed into a tightening right-hander on SS8, hit a bank and rolled his Puma Rally1 onto its side.
Although he reached the end of the stage, the damage was too great to continue.
Millener told DirtFish: “I think it’s disappointing what happened today for everybody. Frustrating when we had a plan to just get to the end with no mistakes, but we’ve looked at ir and it’s one corner, and it’s a type of corner we think is quite similar to what we saw in Paraguay an dwhat we saw in Portugal.
“There’s obviously one type of corner that’s catching him out a little bit, and, you know, it’s how do we portray, or how do we make sure that the 99% of pacenotes that are working fine become 100%.
“One of the things we discussed at lunch when he came back was there’s no margin for error on stages like here. You go wide, you’re off. You go to places like Estonia or Poland, or some of the other fast rallies, if you go off and the back end of the car is off the road you can get away with it, there’s not much in there.
“Here there’s just no margin, we’ve seen that with Thierry [Neuville], we saw it with [Nikolay] Gryazin, we’ve seen it with Jon, we’ve seen it with [Calle] Carlberg, we’ve seen it with loads of them. This is a tricky rally.
“Yesterday the three cars that had the accident, the three Rally2s, Yuki [Yamamoto], Romet [Jürgenson] and Alejandro [Cachón], you know, Jon didn’t have an issue there. He saw that, he knew about that one and it was fine.
“But on this one today, it was a… it was a relatively easy corner that tightened quite sharp, and I think in the recce, at a slower speed, there was a little more time between the corners and you kind of feel that actually it wasn’t as bad as it looked. But here, the speed he carried into the first part of the corner, there was no chance he was going to get around the tightening bit.
“So the first thing is to go and understand why on the recce of the two passes was that OK, and why when you’ve checked the notes back in the hotel room was it still OK, and then when you go through it at speed, it was so wrong.”
Asked what the answer is, Millener suggested it was down to experience.
“I think the guys he’s trying to compete against have been to Chile three, four times now,” he explained. “OK, we’re running the stages the other way, but they still understand the surface, they still understand how slippery it is, how hard it is.
“In all the comments today from the top guys, they’ve again been about impossible to find any traction. And here, Jon’s talking about the understeer as soon as he’s off line, but that’s just a feature of the Chile rally.
“But ERC, there’s less stages, there’s less to check. The cars are slower. You know, we’ve gone up a level again here, and maybe it just goes to show that the smallest weakness in your armour can end up with stuff like today.
“So, definitely disappointing, but something we can certainly work on.”
