Ott Tänak has ripped the Ypres Rally lead away from Thierry Neuville on Saturday’s first stage, but just one tenth of a second splits the Hyundai pair.
Neuville headed into the second day with a 2.5-second advantage over his team-mate but leaked 2.6s on the first pass of Reninge.
That meant Tänak, who won Rally Finland earlier this month, has taken the lead in Belgium for the first time this weekend.
“The road is very dirty and some tricky places, but OK we are here,” said Tänak.
Neuville, who was just sixth fastest, didn’t appear to be too cocnerned: “It was quite a tricky one to start, it was quite dirty so I was quite careful. But the feeling in the car was good.”
Elfyn Evans is in danger of becoming a passenger in the fight for the lead, not helped by arriving to the start of Friday’s final stage one minute late and earning a 10s penalty.
But Evans was at least quicker than Neuville on SS9 and therefore reduced his gap to the leaders to just 12s.
Everyone selected a package of hard compound tires for Saturday morning’s group of four stages, but Oliver Solberg went against the grain in carrying six tires as opposed to five.
It was a safe approach but it was another issue that left him vulnerable to an Adrien Fourmaux attack; Fourmaux nibbled 6.1s out of Solberg’s advantage meaning just 2.2s splits the seventh and eighth-placed crews.
“That was a tricky stage with a lot of understeer, I couldn’t get the front in I couldn’t trust the front,” Solberg said.
“We did some changes from yesterday which weren’t very good.”
Gus Greensmith remains a lonely sixth, describing his stage as “horrible” as the “car was wandering” and “doing what it wanted”.
But he was still quicker than Solberg to increase his overall advantage to 28.1s, lying 41s behind team-mate Craig Breen.
Breen matched the pace of Esapekka Lappi’s Toyota up ahead of him, both setting a time of 7m53.9s to keep the gap between fourth-placed Lappi and fifth-placed Breen at 18.8s.
“I tried some things with the car and in some ways it’s better and some ways it’s a bit worse, but work in progress,” commented Breen.
Lappi accidentally executed his plan to absolute perfection: “I just tried to keep the position where we are,” he said.
“For the moment it looks OK, but easy to improve from my side to be fair. It was not a good stage for us.”
It’s not unusual to see Kalle Rovanperä leading the field away on a round of the World Rally Championship – but not on a Saturday.
But thanks to a mega effort from his Toyota mechanics, he returned on Saturday following his roll on Friday’s second test.
“The car is working fine so big thanks to the mechanics, they are the heroes of this rally. We just try to enjoy the day,” said the erstwhile Ypres Rally leader, who proved a point by setting the fastest time on SS9.
Takamoto Katsuta was next on the road behind his fellow GR Yaris Rally1 driver, lying in 18th overall after a gearbox problem on Friday morning.
But Katsuta has his sights set on climbing back into the top 10 overall – a position currently held by WRC2’s Andreas Mikkelsen.
Beginning the stage, Mikkelsen was 58.4s ahead of Katsuta, so given the pace differential between Rally1 and Rally2 machinery that gap doesn’t seem insurmountable.
“It’s no stress, I try to improve my tasks, weather looks really good so I really enjoyed,” Katsuta said.
