Kalle Rovanperä has rebuffed any ideas Ott Tänak may have had of winning back second place on Rally Estonia, as Elfyn Evans again went quickest on the first stage of Friday afternoon.
Rain has fallen on the stages in between the first and second pass, creating a different surface for the World Rally Championship’s finest.
But it did little to shake up the form book as Evans set the pace once again, just as he had on all four of Friday morning’s stages.
“Grip was changing all the time, standing water, but that’s how it is,” Evans commented, after extending his lead to 19.9 seconds.
Rovanperä got within 1.2s on Peipisääre, but more pertinently he stole 5.3s from Tänak – who had been second overall but for a 10s time penalty collected for running his internal combustion engine in a HEV zone on Thursday.
A Tänak fightback had been expected, but he dropped significant time and admitted it’s “not working at all” aboard his Hyundai.
Team-mate Thierry Neuville’s belief in his own i20 N Rally1 is similarly shot, as he confessed he had “no confidence in the car”. High-speed rallies like Estonia haven’t traditionally been a happy hunting ground for Neuville either, so he’s adopted an alternate strategy to his usual gung-ho approach.
“I know I cannot fight with the guys at the front this weekend so I have to stay clever, bring the car home and see if I can grab a podium at the end of the rally,” he said.
Neuville is currently 29.9s away from the podium, and now behind Esapekka Lappi – despite Lappi clipping and riding over an anti-cut device through a fast left-hander.
With the brakes now working as they should, Lappi was 7.6s faster than his rival to move five seconds ahead and into fourth overall.
“It’s definitely better than in the morning, thanks to the team they fixed the brakes. Pretty rough conditions,” he chuckled.
A careful approach for Takamoto Katsuta has cost him seventh place to Pierre-Louis Loubet, but the Toyota Next Generation driver was happy to “accept” reducing his pace in “this kind of condition”.
Loubet has also closed to 2.3s behind M-Sport team-mate Adrien Fourmaux. Now carrying the weight of being M-Sport’s lead points-nominated driver, Fourmaux had been on a flyer in the early splits, joint fastest with Evans, but time ebbed away from him thereafter and he lost 19.5s to the stage winner.
Fourmaux, running as the last Rally1 car on the road, said: “At the beginning the lines were quite alright, the ground was quite compact, but at the end in the forest there was a lot of ruts, so you really needed to be committed to have a good time in this one.
“I didn’t take any risks because then you have the car snapping, so I was more enjoying this morning but that’s part of rally!”
Gus Greensmith and Oliver Solberg both suffered slow punctures on SS5; Greensmith lost 38.3s and Solberg slightly less at 30.7s.
It keeps Greensmith rooted in ninth place, but he had at least learned from his mistake when running with flailing rubber last time out on the Safari Rally.
“I had to back off as I didn’t want to damage the car like Kenya. It’s just a joke,” he said.
Solberg also copped a 10-second time penalty, having checked out of Friday midday service a minute late. He had struggled to get the EV-only mode working on his Hyundai to leave service; running in combustion engine mode in a HEV zone would also have incurred a penalty.
