Thierry Neuville has immediately hit back at Kalle Rovanperä and retaken the lead of Safari Rally Kenya on SS6 with a commanding stage win despite a slow puncture.
Neuville has led in Africa for most of Friday but was passed by Rovanperä on the first stage of the afternoon – albeit only by 1.2 seconds.
But the Hyundai driver is once again leading the way with just one stage of the day to go and seems to be pushing harder than a lot of his rivals. He won the stage by a clear 11.2s over Rovanperä.
“I was really much afraid about the punctures,” Neuville said, before discovering he had actually picked up a slow puncture and damaged his rear-right rim.
“I felt really slow at the end it was strange for me, I didn’t get the speed I was supposed to get.”
Rovanperä’s pace appeared to be quite strange too as it dropped off quite sharply at around the midpoint of the stage, but the Toyota driver insisted everything was “fine”.
Photo: Toyota Gazoo Racing
“To be honest I tried to be quite sensible,” he said, lying in second place now by 10s.
Ott Tänak continues to occupy third spot but was beaten to the same position on SS6 by Sébastien Ogier who was 0.5s quicker.
Like team-mate Neuville, Tänak was worried about punctures: “Since quite early I had a feeling like a tire delaminated, so I was steady. But we are here.”
Ogier clambered out of his Toyota at the end of the stage to assess the rubber bolted to his Yaris, but this was just precautionary as he insisted “there’s no problem here”.
The championship leader is now up to sixth, at the expense of Adrien Fourmaux, and just 2.2s shy of the other M-Sport car of Gus Greensmith who was another to collect a rear-right puncture in the last section of Kedong.
Fourmaux had been glued to the rear of Greensmith on the leaerboard before SS6 but dropped 25.1s to his team-mate.
Photo: Toyota Gazoo Racing
Takamoto Katsuta is fourth overall, still just within a minute of the rally leader. He was fifth quickest on SS6, 18.1s shy of Neuville’s pace.
“[In the] soft section, you are not on the road,” he said. “[The] under-guard is on the road so you can’t move forward – that’s a problem.”
SS6 times
1 Thierry Neuville/Martijn Wydaeghe (Hyundai) 16m52.1s
2 Kalle Rovanperä/Jonne Halttunen (Toyota) +11.2s
3 Sébastien Ogier/Julien Ingrassia (Toyota) +15.2s
4 Ott Tänak/Martin Järveoja (Hyundai) +15.7s
5 Takamoto Katsuta/Daniel Barritt (Toyota) +18.1s
6 Gus Greensmith/Chris Patterson (M-Sport Ford) +34.4s
Leading positions after SS6
1 Neuville/Wydaeghe 1h09m47.2s
2 Rovanperä/Halttunen +10.0s
3 Tänak/Järveoja +40.7s
4 Katsuta/Barritt +58.6s
5 Greensmith/Patterson +2m27.0s
6 Ogier/Ingrassia +2m29.2s
7 Adrien Fourmaux/Renaud Jamoul (M-Sport Ford) +2m55.6s
8 Onkar Rai/Drew Sturrock (Volkswagen) +10m47.4s
9 Daniel Chwist/Kamil Heller (Ford) +21m39.1s
10 Karan Patel/Tauseef Khan (Ford) +22m14.0s
