Kalle Rovanperä leads the Central European Rally by 36.4 seconds after winning four of Friday’s six stages.
The Toyota driver made great use of being first on the road on wet Tarmac stages and assumed the lead on SS4, the second stage of the day.
He went into the afternoon with an advantage of 29.2s over team-mate Elfyn Evans, and that shrank to 27.5s on SS6 as Evans set the pace.
Hyundai’s Thierry Neuville was second fastest to reinforce his third place in the overall classification, but M-Sport Ford’s Ott Tänak and Toyota duo Sébastien Ogier and Takamoto Katsuta were the only other drivers to go through the stage before it was cancelled due to safety concerns.
Although all the rest of the crews then headed directly to SS7, that stage was delayed. Eventually Rovanperä headed in, and had the cleanest line as the drivers behind him struggled with mud being brought onto the road surface.
A comfortably eight-second stage win grew his lead up to 37.2s, and Neuville beat Evans to second place by 1.7s (despite complaining he had no grip and was “really fighting to keep the car on the road”) to sit 0.3s behind him going into the day’s final stage.
Neuville won SS8 by 1.1s over Rovanperä, who said he struggled with feeling once rain arrived mid-stage. An unhappy Evans gave up second place by going 10s slower than Neuville, but he was still third fastest with the other Rally1 crews losing out even more.
An unwell feeling Ogier was 16.8s off the pace in fourth to move himself up into sixth place, Tänak’s gamble to use soft rather than wet compound tyres cost him 23.2s and Pierre-Louis Loubet dropped the most time as the M-Sport driver stopped for three minutes to do a wheel change, after making a small error beforehand, less than 300 meters onto the stage.
“On the first braking the front completely locked on the braking, I was not thinking that it was so slippery so I go straight and I had to reverse,” Loubet explained, with the front of his M-Sport Puma looking worse for wear.
“When I wanted to change the wheel all the mud was on the wheel, I had to pull all the grass off so we lost a lot of time.”
Yohan Rossel started the day as leader of the Rally2 class but lasted just a few miles on SS3 before retiring, and Andreas Mikkelsen assumed first place over Emil Lindholm. But WRC2 points leader Mikkelsen then had a suspension-damaging crash on SS4 and that put Lindholm into the lead.
He went into the afternoon loop with 17.9s in hand over Erik Cais, a gap which went unchanged on SS6 since no Rally2 drivers got to contest the stage. However it was a different story on SS7, as Lindholm was 15.5s off the pace set by Adrien Fourmaux – who was just “happy to be here” after feeling his car was really on edge – and had his lead over Cais cut to 11.8s.
Lindholm bounced back on SS8. He was beaten to victory by Nikolay Gryazin, who was 5.7s faster, but he added 3.1s to his lead over Cais. Nicolas Ciamin currently completes the WRC2 podium, 24.1s off the lead.
