Kalle Rovanperä has extended his Rally Spain lead, maximizing his road order advantage in damp conditions to further his advantage over Thierry Neuville to 3.3 seconds.
Serra de la Llena is expected to be the wettest test of the Friday morning loop and, with mud being pulled onto the road on the opening stage already affecting drivers further down the road order, the same effect appeared to be even more pronounced on the following test.
While Neuville was able to keep Rovanperä honest, dropping only 2.1s, his Hyundai team-mate Ott Tänak did not fare so well.
Having already complained on the opener that “there is no feeling at all” from his i20 N Rally1 on the rally opener, Tänak was 5.8s off the pace on stage two and dropped from third to fifth.
That allowed Rovanperä’s Toyota team-mate Sébastien Ogier to nick third place, 1.4s behind Neuville.
Toyota’s third-best GR Yaris Rally1, in the hands of Elfyn Evans, had been slightly off the pace on the first test, with Evans admitting he’d been careful. He picked up the pace slightly on stage two to take fourth place and is 1.1s behind Ogier.
A gap between the top five and the rest of the field is already emerging, with Dani Sordo leading the ‘best of the rest’ charge in sixth, 7.8s behind Hyundai team-mate Tänak.
Takamoto Katsuta’s pace improved somewhat on the second stage, clocking the sixth-fastest time and putting him ahead of Craig Breen into seventh overall.
Breen is the highest placed of the M-Sport Ford Pumas in eighth place, 2.2s up on Pierre-Louis Loubet.
Gus Greensmith was visibly struggling in the muddy cuts on stage two and was hesitant to get on the throttle out of corners, going 17.4s slower than stage-winner Rovanperä.
That allowed Adrien Fourmaux to move up into the top 10 at Greensmith’s expense, the pair separated by only 0.4s after Serra de la Llena.
Major title implications came into play in the WRC2 support category, as erstwhile class leader Emil Lindholm suffered a debeaded rear-right tire and briefly spun off the road trying to nurse his car to the finish at speed.
But his decision to press on regardless rather than stop and change the wheel paid off. A typical stop and change mid-stage takes around two minutes; instead, Lindholm lost only 58.5s.
While that does drop Lindholm well outside the top 10 in WRC2, there’s still 17 stages left for him to close down the leaders.
Crucially in the title fight, Kajetan Kajetanowicz has not been on the pace; he could only muster the eighth-fastest time on the rally-opening test and was 7.6s off the pace on stage two, leaving him far adrift of the podium places.
Nikolay Gryazin leads Yohan Rossel by 1.9s at the top of the WRC2 leaderboard, with Hyundai’s Teemu Suninen a further 4.3s back in third.
