Teemu Suninen’s Rally Italy lead over Dani Sordo remains intact after as World Rally Championship leader Elfyn Evans assured three different cars won the first three stages of the event.
Evans emerged from the second pass of Tempio Pausania 2.1 seconds quicker than Sébastien Ogier to trial his third-placed team-mate by the exact same margin overall.
Suninen and Sordo were closely matched, but Sordo – who was third quickest – edged the M-Sport driver by 0.4s to shave Suninen’s rally lead to 5s.
“We will try of course [to take the lead],” Sordo declared. “It was OK, really, really rough, was difficult stage but I’m happy.”
“That was a pretty clean one. Not so many places to improve but yeah it was clean,” Suninen responded.
Ogier admitted he was “happy to be out without trouble” on a stage that had been tipped as a gamechanger pre-event due to its unfamiliarity to the crews and its narrow nature. He and Evans remain in the fight for the lead however, just 12.8s and 14.9s adrift respectively.
Thierry Neuville is exactly 10s adrift of Evans in fifth but needs to be ahead if he is to stand a realistic chance of remaining in the fight for this year’s WRC title.
He was 7.3s slower than Evans on SS3 – a stage that on the first pass had seemed to swing against the Hyundai’s. When asked if the stage just didn’t suit the car, Neuville replied: “I did my best. We have to work on the car, it’s not working on this condition so we struggle.”
Kalle Rovanperä – whose still on just his sixth event in the top league of the WRC – admitted he struggled with the set-up of his Toyota Yaris WRC, having not been able to head to service between the stages as is normally the case. With the stages rougher on the second pass, Rovanperä wasn’t totally at one with the car.
“It was a tricky stage and it’s difficult because we couldn’t change the second loop set-up so the car was quite soft and there was some quite big hits,” he said. He holds his sixth place overall but lost another 3.8s to Neuville on the stage to sit 14.7s back overall.
He has a fight with Gus Greensmith on his hands though; the Briton just 3.3s behind in seventh overall. Greensmith lost 0.4s to Rovanperä on Tempio Pausania 2, but felt he had improved his driving which is his main objective this weekend.
“In there I was trying,” Greensmith said. “There were some places where I maybe lost time pushing too hard, but it was certainly better than [earlier] this morning.”
Ott Tänak’s woeful pace continued on SS3 as he lost 27.4s to Evans to lie 1m11.2s away from the rally lead overall. Pierre-Louis Loubet dropped 9.8s to Takamoto Katsuta in SS3 to hold eighth by just 1s as Katsuta moved up to ninth, dumping Tänak down to 10th.
Adrien Fourmaux is back at the head of WRC2 after Ole Christian Veiby lost 1m05.4s on SS3 – slower even than Mads Østberg who continues to be hampered with just rear-wheel-drive.
Fourmaux set the pace in class, going 7.3s quicker than Pontus Tidemand to head Tidemand by 13.5s overall.
“It was incredible stage, honestly I’m just completely destroyed just now,” he admitted.
“We are lucky because we have four wheels here and we need to continue this for the next stage.”
SS3 times
1 Evans (Toyota) 9m49.0s
2 Ogier (Toyota) +2.1s
3 Sordo (Hyundai) +3.3s
4 Suninen (M-Sport Ford) +3.7s
5 Neuville (Hyundai) +7.3s
6 Katsuta (Toyota) +8.0s
Leading positions after SS3
1 Suninen (M-Sport Ford) 36m49.6s
2 Sordo (Hyundai) +5.0s
3 Ogier (Toyota) +12.8s
4 Evans (Toyota) +14.9s
5 Neuville (Hyundai) +24.9s
6 Rovanperä (Toyota) +39.6s
7 Greensmith (M-Sport Ford) +42.9s
8 Loubet (2C Competition Hyundai) +56.0s
9 Katsuta (Toyota) +57.0s
10 Tänak (Hyundai) +1m11.2s
