Ott Tänak has broken clear on Saturday morning at Acropolis Rally Greece, but team-mate Adrien Fourmaux has lost over a minute after clipping a rock.
Tänak led Fourmaux by just three seconds after Friday’s gruelling leg – with Ogier 16.8s adrift in third.
But two stages wins from three allowed Tänak to gap the pack, establishing an advantage of 33.2s after 10 stages.
Instead attention was on the fight between the two Frenchmen, but Fourmaux let Ogier off the hook when he clipped a rock and broke the rear-right of his Hyundai.
“On outside of the line there was a rock, there was nothing on my pacenote – there was a hit but it broke something on the rear,” he explained.
The incident cost Fourmaux 1m11.0s on the stage and dropped him 1m30.6s back overall.
Elfyn Evans is a lonely (but safe) fourth, but fifth-placed Grégoire Munster lost his place to a charging Takamoto Katsuta behind.
Munster battled without a working handbrake all morning which cost him loads of time, meaning Katsuta managed to nip ahead by 8.5s despite starting Saturday 51s behind.
“We can’t blame ourselves – we try to maximize all we could with the package we had,” Munster said. “Sometimes it’s like this. For sure today having the handbrake is the worst that could happen.”
Katsuta’s battle had been expected to be with world champions Kalle Rovanperä and Thierry Neuville, but he pulled away from them both.
Neuville, who overhauled Rovanperä (by 17.8s) despite a rear-right puncture on the opening stage of the day, ended the loop 8.9s adrift of Katsuta, and 0.4s down on Munster.
Rovanperä meanwhile lost 16s alone on the last stage of the loop: “Not much to tell about that,” the Toyota driver said, “just not going so well at the moment.”
Oliver Solberg continues to lead WRC2 after a trouble-free loop, while Sami Pajari failed to make it out to the stages with a fuel system issue still not fully fixed from Friday.
Josh McErlean did make it through, but shipped several minutes after he broke a suspension arm after an impact on the day’s opening stage. He and co-driver Eoin Treacy fixed the issue, but the incident had also broken a driveshaft leaving them in three-wheel-drive for two stages.
