Elfyn Evans has emerged as a shock Rally Turkey leader as Thierry Neuville, Sébastien Ogier and Sébastien Loeb all ran into trouble on Sunday morning’s gruelling opening stage.
The 23.7-mile Çetibeli test was a brutal way to start a WRC Sunday, touted as “a game changer” by M-Sport’s Teemu Suninen. He wasn’t wrong.
Ogier looked to be the major loser as the first lead runner into the stage and the first to encounter problems. His Toyota picked up a puncture but an incredibly quick change meant he only lost 1m14.5 seconds to new leader Evans, with tire changes usually taking just under two minutes.
The speed of that turnaround helped him to remain in second place overall – a position he shared overnight with Loeb – as erstwhile rally leader Neuville and his Hyundai team-mate Loeb also suffered punctured on the stage.
Neuville stopped to change his flat whereas Loeb did not.
“I tried my best but I thought the damper was broken so I carry on then suddenly I realized the tire was punctured, so we had to change,” Neuville said at the stage finish after shouting French expletives immediately over the line.
Photo: Hyundai Motorsport
The net result of all of that is Evans, who was 31.6s quicker than anyone else on the stage, now holds a 46.9s advantage over Ogier at the head of the field, with Neuville a mere 0.8s off Ogier in third.
Loeb has dropped to fourth, but is still under six seconds off Ogier in second.
It wasn’t just the leaders in trouble on SS9. Ogier’s Toyota team-mate Kalle Rovanperä was another to pick up a puncture, saying he “didn’t see the stone” he hit “due to the dust”.
Despite that drama, Rovanperä actually stayed in the same fifth position he began the test in.
The aforementioned Suninen was another of the casualties, his Fiesta parked up next to a forest access road with the left-rear wheel hanging at a 135-degree angle out of its arch. He would go no further, and thus surrendered his sixth position.
Team-mate Esapekka Lappi decided to copy team-mate Suninen’s rear geometry set-up aboard his M-Sport Ford Fiesta WRC on Sunday – the same set-up Suninen used in Turkey last year – in a bid to find the ultimate feeling in the car.
But this became academic such was the attrition on Sunday morning, with Lappi the fifth driver to pick up a puncture.
“I wasn’t sure first of all if it was a puncture but it was so we needed to change it,” said Lappi, who remains seventh.
Suninen’s exit and Lappi’s tire woe means Gus Greensmith is now the lead M-Sport driver, jumping up from eight at the start of the stage to sixth.
Greensmith admitted “the car started feeling really weird” towards the end of the stage, suspecting this may have been an overheating issue, which was essentially a major let-off in the circumstances as he set the third-fastest time on stage.
Pierre-Louis Loubet must be wishing world championship rallies didn’t run on Sundays, as for the second event in a row, his rally unravelled on Sunday morning.
In Estonia, Loubet parked up after damaging a steering arm but in Turkey he appeared even more unlucky. He parked his 2C Competition Hyundai i20 Coupe WRC just over 15 miles into the test, and quickly lifted the bonnet.
The as-yet undiagnosed issue cost him his first points finish in a WRC car, as he retired from ninth place.
World Rally Champion Ott Tänak returned to action and opened the road after retiring from the contest early on Saturday with a steering issue aboard his Hyundai, and was second fastest on the stage.
Despite the intercom sporadically failing between him and co-driver and Martin Järveoja – meaning Tänak couldn’t hear his pacenotes at points – the Rally Estonia winner was still second fastest because of the drama that afflicted others, and there were lingering walls of dust slowed those behind him on the road, despite the four-minute starting gaps between the crews.
The leading Rally2 runners are now occupying the final three positions in the overall top 10 thanks to the demise of Suninen and Loubet.
Kajetan Kajetanowicz is eighth and leading WRC3, 43.2s ahead of Marco Bulacia, with WRC2 leader Pontus Tidemand now in 10th overall.
Mercifully for the drivers, the next stage is some 19.9 miles shorter than Çetibeli but they will have to repeat this fearsome stage later on Sunday morning.
SS9 times
1 Evans (Toyota) 28m38.9s
2 Tanak (Hyundai) +31.6s
3 Greensmith (M-Sport Ford) +42s
4 Ogier (Toyota) +1m14.5s
5 Loeb (Hyundai) +1m20s
6 Neuville (Hyundai) +1m48.5s
Leading positions after SS9
1 Evans (Toyota) 2h06m18.3s
2 Ogier (Toyota) +46.9s
3 Neuville (Hyundai) +47.7s
4 Loeb (Hyundai) +52.4s
5 Rovanperä (Toyota) +2m12.1s
6 Greensmith (M-Sport Ford) +2m56.6s
7 Lappi (M-Sport Ford) +3m41s
8 Kajetanowicz (Škoda) +8m05.6s
9 Bulacia (Citroen) +8m48.8s
10 Tidemand (Škoda) +9m16.5s
