Thierry Neuville comfortably leads Central European Rally ahead of Kalle Rovanperä who is on track for his second World Rally Championship title in as many years.
After a dramatic morning loop, the Saturday afternoon stages were largely about holding station for the top crews, with Neuville extending his lead to a healthy 26.2 seconds. Rovanperä adopted a more cautious strategy in order to try to secure the title but did set the fastest time on the final stage, beating Neuville by just 0.5s.
Rovanperä’s team mate, Sébastien Ogier, finally started to find some rythmn and appeared much happier with the conditions, as he set two fastest times of his own, beating Neuville to the fastest time on SS12 by 1.5s and then Ott Tänak by just 0.1s on SS13.
Going onto the final stage of the day, he was over 50s behind the Puma of Tänak in third, so a podium looked unlikely. But that may now change, as the M-Sport driver ran into trouble in the darkness of SS14.
Tänak slipped off the road and into a ditch in exactly the same spot as his team-mate, Pierre-Louis Loubet, had earlier. He finished the stage 30.4s behind Rovanperä but, crucially, his advantage over Ogier dropped to 31.1s.
Tänak was atypically irate at himself for the error, lambasting his “stupid instinct” to pull the handbrake when the front wheels locked up.
The biggest fight among the Rally1 crews is now between Takamoto Katsuta and Teemu Suninen for fifth place. The Hyundai driver had passed Katsuta in the morning, as the Toyota man looked lost in the muddy conditions, but the tables were turned in the afternoon.
Katsuta immediately took back the position on SS12, taking a sizeable 8.3 seconds out of the Finn. He took another 1.9 in SS13 and a further three seconds in the final stage to 10.9s clear.
In WRC2 there was late drama as Nikolay Gryazin went off on the last stage and had to be rescued by spectators. The incident cost him almost four minutes and drops him down to 10th place in the points-scoring positions.
Gryazin’s misfortune was good news for Gus Greensmith, who had a much better afternoon. He passed Miko Marczyk (who had a brief off of his own) on the final stage of the day and, with Gryazin’s off-road excursion, has moved up to fifth place. That means, as it stands, the title battle with Andreas Mikkelsen will go down to the powerstage.
The non-points scoring Adrien Fourmaux moved into the overall Rally2 lead, having been fastest on all of the afternoon’s stages, and he now leads WRC2 leader Emil Lindholm by 6.5s, with Nicolas Ciamin a further 20.9s back in third.
