Kalle Rovanperä was a cut above the rest on the opening morning of Rally Islas Canarias, winning all three of Friday’s first loop of stages to lead by 17.8s – while the Hyundai drivers struggled to match the pace of the Toyotas.
While hesitant to read too much into the shakedown times, Rovanperä was able to replicate his pace advantage from the Thursday warm-up when the stopwatch resumed, even if he still wasn’t able to find the right tire pressures on the hard compound Hankooks.
“A bit surprised with the time to be honest,” said Rovanperä after the first stage, which he won by 6.5s. “It didn’t feel so good. We definitely we not in optimal tire pressure, we need to focus to prepare the tire better on the next ones.”
Those tweaks were effective: Rovanperä outpaced team-mate Sébastien Ogier by 6.7s on the Valleseco test, then added another stage win on La Aldea for good measure.
Despite his imperious form early doors, Rovanperä had nothing but concerns to share at the end of the rally’s first loop.
After struggling with tire management on the opening stage, Ogier felt he'd hit his stride on the final test of the Friday morning loop
“It was not good at all,” said Rovanperä of his run through La Aldea. “I was struggling much more on this stage than the others, especially in the beginning of the stage. I don’t know why but I had a lot of understeer, I couldn’t get the tire and the balance to work.”
Toyota’s trio of senior drivers pulled away from the rest of the field straight away, with Ogier and championship leader Elfyn Evans battling between themselves over second position.
Ogier had struggled with his tires overheating on the first stage of the loop, his pressures set too high, but bested Evans on the next two tests to build a narrow 2.4s gap over his teammate.
While it was all smiles in the Toyota camp, Hyundai’s senior duo were quickly cast adrift of the top end of the timesheets – without any clear understanding of why their cars felt amiss.
Something is wrong for sure. Nobody knows to tell me what and I don’t know either.Thierry Neuville
Adrien Fourmaux at least prevented a Toyota top-five lockout by placing fourth overall, 14s adrift of Evans’ GR Yaris Rally1. But Thierry Neuville and Ott Tänak were both unhappy with how their i20s were handling – and neither had a clue how to fix it, indicating they’d been struggling since their pre-event test.
Neuville was languishing down in eighth place, 45.4s off the lead, and suggested he had no clue how to adjust his i20 N Rally1 to go any faster.
“It’s no surprise to be honest,” said Neuville. “I can’t tell you what’s going on – I don’t know. But I try my best. Something is wrong for sure. Nobody knows to tell me what and I don’t know either.”
While Neuville expressed cluelessness, Ott Tänak – 2.5s up the road in seventh place – was more blunt in his assessment: “The car has no balance,” the 2019 world champion remarked at the finish of SS2. “We can only kill the tires. I did already the test like this and unfortunately we couldn’t figure it out before the rally.”
His frustration at Hyundai not understanding what was causing a performance deficit to Toyota was clear: “It’s not about being confused – the engineers have no idea what’s happening, so why should we?”
Neither Tänak nor Neuville appear optimistic their troubles can be remedied at midday service
The second-string GR Yaris Rally1s found improved pace on the the final test of the morning, Sami Pajari drawing to within 0.2s of Fourmaux’s fourth place and Takamoto Katsuta nicking sixth place away from Tänak on La Aldea.
M-Sport’s pair of Puma Rally1s propped up the rear of the top class order. Grégoire Munster is 22.7s behind Neuville in ninth place and simply lacked confidence to lean on the front of the car on turn-in, essential for fast stage times on the racetrack-like Gran Canaria roads.
“It’s always sliding on top of the surface, I don’t know what to do,” Munster said.
“We changed the balance so it’s a bit more predictable but when it doesn’t bite, there is nothing you can do. It’s impossible to know how fast you can go through the corners because you don’t know how much distance the car is going to do on the tire.”
Josh McErlean is 11th, running behind WRC2 leader Yohan Rossel’s Citroën C3 Rally2.
Rossel mirrored Rovanperä’s dominant start to the rally with three stage wins from three, while Alejandro Cachón and the rally leader’s younger brother Leo Rossel moved into second and third respectively on La Aldea when Nikolay Gryazin dropped time.
