Punctures have become almost a nemesis of Sébastien Ogier’s in recent years, and he was keen to avoid picking any up this weekend on Croatia Rally.
But as it turned out, playing it safe ended up causing more trouble than it might have done, when the eight-time World Rally champion picked up a puncture on SS2.
Ogier had been leading the rally going into the second test and was fastest in the opening splits, but while avoiding a cut at high speed, he hit a compression point, causing the tire on his GR Yaris Rally1 to deflate.
“I [was] trying to be safe, avoiding a cut actually,” Ogier explained to DirtFish.
“The compression on the road was hard and it was on high speed.
“It’s hard to see that in recce because you go 60kph an hour or whatever and now you’re going 160/170kph, I don’t know, and yeah, trying to be safe actually put us in trouble.
“We used to go in the cut but this cut in recce was full of mud. So tried to be safe, like I said.
“Tried to avoid it, but at high speed the compression broke the wheel.”
Although Ogier lost considerable time, a remarkably fast tire change (it took a mere 1m07 seconds to swap them over) minimized the time loss, and he finished Friday afternoon seventh overall.
But Ogier wasn’t the only driver to be caught out with a puncture either.
His team-mate Kalle Rovanperä also picked up a puncture in exactly the same place, and a slower tire change meant that he lost over two minutes.
He’s now 12th overall, 2m35.9s off rally leader Thierry Neuville.
