Kalle Rovanperä is running away with the lead on Rally Islas Canarias, continuing his 100% stage win streak from the rally start and increasing his gap over Toyota teammate Sébastien Ogier to 36.9s.
On the opening two stages of Saturday morning Ogier was in the same ballpark as Rovanperä, topping the early splits on Moya before the younger Toyota driver pulled it back in the final five kilometres.
“It doesn’t mean we’re going to win a stage but at least we have been one split faster this weekend,” said Ogier, raising his fists in humorous celebration.
On the Tejeda test Rovanperä put the hammer down once more, setting the pace by a whopping 8.4s over the rest of the field.
His feedback at stage end was ominous for the rest of the field: “I didn’t even push, the speed is good because everything works together,” said the two-time world champion.
Rovanperä has found the ideal "flow" on Gran Canaria's wider, racetrack-like sections
“Like I’ve said many times, on this type of road it’s not about pushing, it’s about having a nice flow.”
Championship leader Elfyn Evans is 16.1s behind Ogier in third and admitted that he, not the car, was to blame for falling further behind.
“It’s not a surprise,” said Evans. “The car was working fine but I wasn’t happy with how I drove in there. There’s no excuses.”
Sami Pajari was marginally slower than Evans over the course of the Saturday morning loop, the gap between third and fourth place increasing to 23.9s; Takamoto Katsuta is a further 9.1s behind in fifth place.
Adrien Fourmaux resumed his place at the head of the Hyundai train in sixth. Reverting to a setup similar to one he had on the rally’s opening stage allowed him to immediately pass both Thierry Neuville and Ott Tänak on Saturday’s first test, Moya.
But that was about as good as it got for both Fourmaux and Hyundai as a whole. None of the i20 trio were able to close the gap to the Toyota army ahead of them, with Fourmaux’s gap to Katsuta increasing to 13.7s.
It was bad yesterday but I don’t know how to describe today.Ott Tänak
Neuville indicted he has run out of settings to change, declaring that he is “on the limit of what I can do.”
“I have no other differentials available this weekend,” explained Neuville, “so I’m stuck with what I have. I have tested every setting, I have tried my best.”
Tänak, now 14.3s adrift of Neuville and languishing in eighth position, felt he was even slower than the the rally’s opening day: “I don’t know what’s happening,” he admitted.
“It was bad yesterday but I don’t know how to describe today.”
Both M-Sport cars remain in the running but Grégoire Munster is now a distant ninth, 1m14.6s behind Tänak, and Josh McErlean remains outside the top 10.
With inverted road order for the Rally1 runners, McErlean started ahed of Munster, with the latter able to see why his rookie team-mate was struggling to match his pace.
Like the Hyundai trio, both M-Sport drivers have struggled to find a groove and are struggling to trust the front end of their cars
“I could see his line, I think he was overheating at the end so the lines were not always good,” Munster said of McErlean. “The car is not always doing what we want so I understand his frustration.
“We don’t manage to generate grip so we are sliding over the surface, so it leaves a bit of rubber on the ground. I see that sometimes he doesn’t manage to keep the inside of the corner, so then I try to drive a bit slower to get a better exit but we are still too slow.”
McErlean concurred, admitting his morning was “a disaster.”
“It’s probably the most we’ve suffered all rally,” he said of the loop-ending Tejeda test.
And even former M-Sport driver Fourmaux, third on the road, could see that both Munster and McErlean were trying hard but getting no purchase out of their Ford Pumas: “I think the Ford in front of us was really pushing, the lines were crazy,” he said.
Yohan Rossel's firm grip on WRC2 has been weakend by Spanish superchampion Alejandro Cachón
Yohan Rossel’s WRC2 lead is finally under threat, with Alejandro Cachón scoring the first WRC2 stage wins of his career on SS7 and SS9 to nrrow the gap to 14.8s.
Emil Lindholm has dropped out of the battle for third place after picking up a puncture on Tejeda and dropping over a minute. Fellow Škoda runner Nikolay Gryazin currently completes the podium positions, with the second Citroën of Leo Rossel 7.7s down the road in fourth.
