Sébastien Ogier is edging closer to leading the Monte Carlo Rally, cutting the deficit to Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans to only 4.5 seconds.
After storming into the lead on Thursday night, Evans didn’t win a stage all day on Friday. But that didn’t matter; his consistency ensured that he retained the lead, albeit with increasing pressure from behind.
At first, the biggest threat seemed to be from Hyundai’s Thierry Neuville, who started the day in second place.
But a spin on Saint Clément set him back 10 seconds; Neuville was confused as to what had even happened, his best was loose gravel had sent him around.
Neuville was fastest on two out of three stages on Friday afternoon
That brought Ogier into the fray, as his dominant turn of pace on stage five, going 11.2s faster than anyone else, brought him right into the lead battle.
Come the afternoon it was Neuville that took the initiative, winning the two daytime stages before darkness fell for stage eight.
When it came time to run through La Bréole-Sennolet again, though, Ogier was back to his masterful best, carving 4.1s out of Evans’ lead.
“It was a difficult start of the race but we expected it with our start position,” said Ogier.
A masterful display from nine-time Monte winner Ogier has moved him to within touching distance of the lead
“I’m glad we are very close; tomorrow will be fun,” he added, perhaps ominously.
Evans simply couldn’t keep pace with Ogier in the darkness of the final stage: “A lot of information but I couldn’t really see a lot of it, to be honest. Very difficult to read the conditions on the road.”
Neuville was faster than Evans across all three stages of the afternoon loop; he’s now 16.1s off the top spot, despite complaining that both his steering wasn’t quite right and also that his differential had problems under braking, having been forced into a chance when his original gearbox had started to leak.
Ott Tänak had fallen perilously close to the clutches of M-Sport’s Adrien Fourmaux by midday service.
Time in a ditch on Friday morning's opener cost Tänak his shot at a Monte win
The Hyundai returnee slid wide on some ice that caught out multiple drivers on the day’s opening test, which had cost him about half a minute and had dropped him out of podium contention.
He was the fourth-fastest car throughout the afternoon, pulling away from Fourmaux and solidifying that same position on the leaderboard with a gap of 24.4s to the Ford Puma behind.
“It was definitely sketchy,” he said of the final nighttime stage. “We’ve been struggling quite a bit here, not in a good rhythm here.”
A strong start to the day for Fourmaux included a third-fastest time on stage five, where some drivers had been too cautious in a section that many route note crews had marked up plenty of ice but much of it had melted by the time the Rally1 cars arrived.
Returning Rally1 M-Sport driver Fourmaux turned in a smooth and self-assured drive
His afternoon was more subdued, failing to break into the top five stage times but still holding a comfortable 1m20.9s lead over the third Hyundai of Andreas Mikkelsen.
It was another day of acclimatising to the i20 N Rally1 for Mikkelsen. Neither driving style or coping with the hybrid element of the car was a concern: it was simply the extra grip from the advanced aerodynamics that he hadn’t figured out how to extract all the pace from yet without braking too early.
Despite a mostly quiet day, he was satisfied with his efforts: “We had a good day, I would say. A lot of mileage; for sure I’d like to be faster. But there’s so much to learn in these cars and the extra speed. It will come; it’s four years in a different car.”
M-Sport’s Grégoire Munster remains seventh after a mostly clean day of running. His only mistake was the same as Tänak’s, having slid off at the same place on stage three.
What's not to love about a Monte hairpin and stunning valley view?
Another driver who got stuck in the same snowbank, Takamoto Katsuta, has some work to do if he wants to score any points for the Friday-Saturday section of the rally.
Under the new points system, the top 10 are awarded points for the order they reach the final stage of Saturday’s action, with Sunday and the power stage scored separately.
Katsuta needs to find around two minutes on Saturday over the WRC2 leaders if he wants to climb into the top 10 and get off the mark tomorrow; otherwise, he’ll need to wait for Sunday.
Pepe López had dominated the opening two stages on Thursday night but was reeled in by the chasing Citroën duo of Nikolay Gryazin and Yohan Rossel.
Lopez has been the star of the show through the first day and a half of the Monte
Gryazin and López swapped the lead multiple times throughout the day; in the end, Gryazin’s push on the night-time stage eight, which had left him “scared”, was enough to hold first place overnight by a mere 1.3s.
Rossel experienced a mild panic at lunchtime when his Citroën C3 Rally2 started smoking midway through stage five – but he came back unperturbed in the afternoon and kept in touch with the leaders.
Closing in on all three of them is Oliver Solberg. Though not registered for WRC2 points, he was still determined to go as fast as he could and won all three stages on the afternoon pass, trimming the gap to Gryazin to only 28.7s.
Sami Pajari, also not registered for points, is a distant fifth in the lead Toyota GR Yaris Rally2, 1m20.8s behind Solberg and with Nicolas Ciamin in the best Hyundai i20N Rally2 bearing down rapidly on him.
Toyota's all-new GR Yaris Rally2 hit the ground running with Sami Pajari
Without a spin at a hairpin for Ciamin, Pajari would already have lost his position; the pair are only five seconds apart heading into Saturday.
Stéphane Lefebvre was also lucky not to lose seventh position – fifth among the points-scorers – on the final stage of the day; his brakes had lost pressure, costing him over a minute. Jan Solans is only 13.7s behind him in another Yaris.
