Ott Tänak has swiped 2.7 seconds out of Craig Breen’s rally lead to trail his rival by 3s overall at the end of Saturday morning’s Rally Sweden loop.
Breen started the leg with a 2.6s advantage over the 2019 world champion, but immediately upped that to 4.6s after the day’s opener.
A stage win on SS10 then extended Breen’s lead by another 1.1s but the final stage of the morning, Sävar, was more technical than the two that had preceded it and that worked in Tänak’s favor.
“This one was better,” he said, “it’s not so fast so we were able to be a bit better.”
Breen however had reasoning for his time loss: “Unfortunately one of those instances where I was upside down was last year and I never got to do this stage, so it was the first time discovering it,” he said.
“So that’s absolutely fine, I was expecting that to be honest.”
Esapekka Lappi made some changes to the setup of his Hyundai and lived to regret them on Saturday morning – declaring after SS10 that he wants to revert to his Friday setup.
As a result, he has lost touch with the two ahead of him, trailing Tänak by 14.7s, and is now creeping into the clutches of SS11 stage winner Kalle Rovanperä who’s 10.2s behind.
Lappi though described his SS11 as “pretty OK” but was left to rue his time loss on the first two tests of the loop.
The battle for fourth, fifth and sixth on the leaderboard is bubbling away nicely as just 6.3s covers Rovanperä, Thierry Neuville and Elfyn Evans.
Rovanperä overhauled his Toyota team-mate for fourth on the second stage of the loop, despite feeling his Yaris was “s*** to drive” after he made some suspension changes overnight.
But he was quickest of the trio on SS11 after making some more tweaks.
“We made new changes on the road section so finally it was a bit better,” Rovanperä confirmed.
Evans though has lost further time to Neuville who won the opening stage of Saturday, but still has a second in hand in the battle for fifth.
“I’m not surprised at all, it’s not working as it should,” said Evans, who lost four seconds to Neuville on the stage.
“I’m struggling a lot with the overall balance.”
Asked if he was confident he could fix it at service, he said: “No.”
Pierre-Louis Loubet is a lonely seventh, well over a minute behind Evans.
Oliver Solberg’s WRC2 lead has grown to 31.4s after his closest rival, Sami Pajari, suffered a fifth-gear spin on the morning’s second stage.
That demoted to Pajari to fourth, 6.2s behind Jari Huttunen but the morning’s star performer has been Ole Christian Veiby who won two stages to move up to second, streaking 19.3s clear of Huttunen.
