A stage win on the Friday afternoon pass of Serra de la Llena by Kalle Rovanperä has resulted in a Toyota one-two on Rally Spain, with the newly crowned World Rally champion taking second away from Thierry Neuville.
Light rain just as the field entered SS6 added some spice to the middle sector, the surface of which became somewhat slick.
As first car on the road, Rovanperä appeared to have the best conditions of the earlier runners and went 4.6 seconds faster than Neuville.
Those running mid-pack in the road order, seemingly able to react in time to the incoming shower, had gone for a mixed set of hards and softs, compared to the all-round hards sported by Rovanperä and Ott Tänak.
That helped rally leader Sébastien Ogier retain his top spot, his lead increasing from 3.2s to 4.3s, now with a team-mate directly behind rather than a Hyundai.
Tänak would have hoped to catch and pass Rovanperä for a podium place on stage six, given he’d reduced the gap to 0.4s on the prior test.
Alas, he suffered in a similar way to Neuville, dropping 4.2s but edging closer to his team-mate and is now 3.3s behind him.
Elfyn Evans was off the pace and amongst the slowest Rally1 cars on SS6, falling to 9.9s behind Tänak and allowing Dani Sordo an opportunity to close in.
Friday morning had brought little joy for the third Hyundai but Sordo has now been third-fastest twice in a row, his confidence behind the wheel returning on cleaner roads.
Seventh place remains something of a stalemate, with Takamoto Katsuta taking a few tenths of a second back from Craig Breen in the lead M-Sport Ford.
Breen wasn’t the fastest Ford Puma on Serra de la Llena, though. That honor went to Pierre-Louis Loubet, who lost nearly a minute on Friday morning from a puncture but is now closing in on the intra-team battle between Adrien Fourmaux and Gus Greensmith ahead of him.
Fourmaux took another 1.5s out of Greensmith to extend his advantage in ninth place to 7.1s, though Loubet is now only a further 11.8s despite his earlier dramas.
WRC2’s title fight has livened up again, as Kajetan Kajetanowicz had a high-speed spin and dropped into Emil Lindholm’s clutches.
While Teemu Suninen has been busy fending off Nikolay Gryazin in the fight for the rally lead, Kajetanowicz versus Lindholm is the battle that matters most, as both are in a prime position to pass the absent Andreas Mikkelsen in the standings and stake a claim for the WRC2 title.
Lindholm had lost a minute on the first running of Serra de la Llena with a puncture, having clipped a small piece of concrete.
But on the second pass of the same stage, Kajetanowicz lost control on a slightly polluted corner cut and spun out at speed, losing 19.1s.
That means the pair are now only 3.4s apart. With the pair effectively level in the championship once dropped scores are applied, it’s now effectively a direct fight for the title, so long as both surpass Mikkelsen’s point total by season’s end.
