A few hours can change everything.
Waking up on Friday morning an encouraging third overall, just 2.6 seconds off the lead, Grégoire Munster tucks into his lunch 12 positions further down and effectively seven minutes shy of the front.
It hasn’t been the Safari Rally Kenya morning the M-Sport man was after.
Things started badly from the off: losing a minute on the morning’s opener when he was caught in the dust left by Sami Pajari, who had stopped to change a flat tire.
Then his rear-right suspension broke on the day’s second stage, compromising his loop thereafter and leaving him powerless to mount any comeback.
“Picked up a puncture on the last one as well, so I think it couldn’t go worse,” Munster rued. “I’m starting to laugh about it.”
His entire morning has been a chain reaction of events, starting from the first stage.
“We hit a rock when being in the dust of Sami, and that bent an arm slightly,” Munster explained. “So when we got to the rough section of Loldia [SS4], I think it just snapped.
“The arm being snapped, it ripped the driveshaft as well so we had a bit of work to do after the stage. But yeah, it’s good we managed to end the loop. There’s still a very long way to go.”
Munster and co-driver Louis Louka had to work hard to repair the Puma Rally1 on the road section between SS4 and SS5.
“We were taking the driveshaft out,” Munster said, “and when you have all that mud that starts to dry up it’s really difficult to get the bolts out of the different arms.
“So also because it was a bit bent we needed to remove some other arms to manage to put the new one back in, so obviously it was a bit of work.”
Neuville plans to protest his jump-start
World champion Thierry Neuville’s fortunes were the polar opposite to Munster, shooting up the leaderboard on Friday morning instead of sliding down.
But his loop was far from perfect – beginning with a one-minute penalty for leaving service six minutes late after a driveshaft and transmission change, and then a 10s jump-start penalty at the start of SS5.
He’s currently fourth overall.
“First of all very disappointed that we got hit early with trouble at the beginning of the rally,” Neuville said.
“The mechanics did what they could to fix the car but obviously straightaway 1m20s lost to kick off the rally is obviously a lot, but on the other hand it’s a very challenging one, so if you can afford that it’s probably better here than anywhere else.”
On his jump-start penalty, Neuville added: “We just need to analyze because we got a time penalty for leaving too early, but actually there was a problem with the timing system so we should get back those 10 seconds.
“Suddenly the time switched and our times were not matching anymore and at some point we had to go, we didn’t really know when so obviously we left a bit too early.”
