Ott Tänak has taken his third career Rally Finland victory, beating World Rally Championship leader Kalle Rovanperä by 6.8 seconds as Esapekka Lappi survived a penultimate stage roll to claim third.
Tänak’s victory was his, and Hyundai’s, second of the season and moves him just one point ahead of his team-mate Thierry Neuville in the championship.
With Neuville only managing fifth in Finland, Rovanperä’s lead in the title race swelled once again – now standing at 94 points, thanks to a powerstage win, with five rounds of the season remaining.
Tänak controlled Rally Finland from as early as Friday morning. It was Neuville’s i20 that led after Thursday night’s Harju stage, but a blistering time from Tänak on Friday’s opener powered him into a lead he would never relinquish.
His biggest challenger early on was the Toyota of Lappi who kept the 2019 world champion honest, trailing by just 6.2s overnight on Friday. But once the weather worsened on Saturday so did Lappi’s pace, and he soon fell backwards into the waiting clutches of Rovanperä.
Rovanperä had been hampered on the first day as road sweeper and was fourth overnight behind team-mate Elfyn Evans, but the championship leader was on the move on Saturday and soon established himself as Tänak’s main threat.
The pair were split by just 8.4s heading into the final day but Tänak, who was driving well outside his comfort zone to produce stage times capable of staying ahead, wasn’t about to surrender to the Rovanperä juggernaut.
Beating his rival by 1.9s on Sunday morning’s opener sealed the deal, as with a deficit of 10.3s Rovanperä knew he wasn’t going to be able to hunt Tänak down on pace alone. Banking 18 points for second was better than risking them in the pursuit of 25, and Tänak had therefore earned his break to score Hyundai’s first ever Rally Finland win.
“Toyota guys gave me some hope on Friday in the beginning and since then we saw some light at the end of the tunnel so definitely, we were pushing,” he said.
“Only thing I want to say is in these difficult times it’s really all down to my wife, she’s been supporting me so bad and I’m really proud of her, I love you so much.”
The gap behind the top two was over a minute in the end after Lappi made life difficult for himself on SS21 of 22, rolling his GR Yaris Rally1 over three times when running wide and catching a rut. Emergency repairs were completed before the powerstage which kept him in the rally and he duly secured his second podium finish of the season – albeit without his windshield and plenty of his roof.
“I don’t know what to say. Sorry for the team for wrecking the car… yeah, and thank you for everything, good to be here,” Lappi said.
Evans won in Finland last year but was forced to settle for fourth in 2022 – a result he looked consigned to anyway before his fate was sealed late on Saturday when a damper broke and forced him to ail through the final stage of the day with a bodged repair.
Neuville’s fifth place was actually his best Rally Finland result since 2016 and was realistically the most he was ever going to achieve on a rally he’s not particularly comfortable with. He simply wasn’t willing to take the same risks Tänak was and that left him over two minutes behind at the finish.
Sixth was perhaps a disappointing result for Takamoto Katsuta who resides in Finland and had big hopes for this weekend, but it was another consistent and major mistake-free drive from Toyota’s Next Generation driver whose only real dramas were a pair of spins on Friday and Saturday.
M-Sport Ford endured another difficult weekend, with Gus Greensmith the first Puma home in seventh place as the only driver to not run into any strife.
Two-time Finland podium finisher Craig Breen represented the team’s greatest hope and he was in the mix early on, running just adrift of the top four but crucially ahead of Neuville and Katsuta before it all went wrong on Saturday.
Getting his line wrong over a crest, Breen was a fraction too far to the right and smacked a rock which ripped the rear-right wheel and suspension clean out, leading to an inevitable retirement.
Breen did at least set a competitive time on the powerstage, edging Evans by 0.009s for the second-fastest powerstage time.
Greensmith struggled early on in the rally, running at the back of the Rally1 pack, but his confidence grew throughout and he finished strongly to score his best WRC result since Sardinia.
Team-mate Pierre-Louis Loubet had been 22.4s in arrears of Greensmith before the powerstage, but a technical problem on the road section forced Loubet out of the contest with one stage to go.
Adrien Fourmaux’s weekend was undone by breaking a bolt in his steering arm on Friday morning, that he impressively managed to fix and avoid retiring from, and then power-steering failure later that day.
Rally1 debutant Jari Huttunen suffered from that same power-steering problem, albeit intermittently, and a fuel pressure problem starved him of power at the end of Friday. Loubet’s retirement promoted Huttunen into the final points-scoring position in 10th.
For a second year in a row, Teemu Suninen took WRC2 honors in Finland after an intense fight with fellow Finnish countryman Emil Lindhom.
Suninen took the lead on Friday morning and never looked back in his Hyundai, but Lindholm’s Škoda was a perennial threat and could never be shaken off.
In the end Suninen edged Lindholm by 7.7s for what was also eighth and ninths places overall, while Egon Kaur completed the WRC2 podium in his Volkswagen, 10.6s ahead of Hayden Paddon.
Oliver Solberg’s rally meanwhile never really got going after a crash on the second corner of Friday’s opening stage damaged the rollcage and ruled him out of the event thereafter.
