Jari-Matti Latvala has always been emphatically clear: Toyota does not believe in team orders.
The question on Friday night had been whether Kalle Rovanperä and Sébastien Ogier should help Elfyn Evans, with the Welshman sandwiched between the two world champions after the first day of forest action had finished.
That initial debate went out the window when a driveshaft failure on Päijälä cost Evans around six minutes before midday service and plummeted him down from second to eighth place. But that now sets up a much more straightforward team order decision: whether to slow Rally1 debutant Sami Pajari down to help Evans.
“There is a possibility of course that you could drop Sami behind [Elfyn],” Latvala, who is competing in WRC2 this weekend, told DirtFish.
“It’s something I’m sure Kaj [Lindström, sporting director], Tom [Fowler, technical director] and [Yuichiro] Haruna [project director], are considering of course, thinking about that position.
“It’s never nice but when you have a technical thing, which is coming to play a role and taking your points away and when Sami is doing only one event, I think it’s something now that we could consider to exercise at the end of the evening if you want to think about the championship for Elfyn.”
Evans is currently 44.6 seconds behind the lead WRC2 car of Oliver Solberg in sixth overall; Pajari meanwhile is 6m19.2s up the road from Evans and only 31.3s behind M-Sport’s Adrien Fourmaux.
Impeding Pajari to promote Evans up a position has few implications, considering Pajari is in fifth place and has already suitably impressed the team, as indicated by Lindström on Friday. But Latvala pointed out the circumstances of Pajari’s debut meant team order were a no-brainer and it wouldn’t necessarily be the same with other drivers involved.
“This is quite obvious in this end,” added Latvala. “It’s a different story if you have a driver doing full championships and driving their own one and then you have to ask them to slow down.”
Evans himself is concentrated on getting ahead of the two WRC2 cars ahead.
“There’s points to catch back let’s say against the WRC2 guys so we need to have a good and clean afternoon and try and get some points from the day at least,” he said.
