Toyota have elected to retire Elfyn Evans from Acropolis Rally Greece ahead of Saturday’s final stage, electing to preserve his GR Yaris Rally1 rather than attempt to undertake the next superspecial and the subsequent long road section back to Lamia.
Evans rolled on the second pass of Aghii Theodori, catching a rut and tipping his car over in a slow downhill hairpin.
While he reached the end of the stage – having stopped for several minutes to let team-mate Sébastien Ogier by first – there were knock-on effects for the Yaris, which sustained substantial damage despite the slow speed of the incident.
Half an hour was spent by Evans and co-driver Scott Martin attempting to fix the Yaris but the call later came from Toyota to pull over and retire the car. An early retirement allows Toyota more service time to repair Evans’ damaged car.
“You’ve got to do what you can, obviously,” Evans told DirtFish of his efforts to fix the car, which would later turn out to be in vain. “In essence, the car will drive, but I think it’s a decision that it’s probably better in the circumstance to get it right for tomorrow.
“We haven’t had the full conversation yet, but they’ve worked it out. I think there’s no influence on the points anyway.”
Evans had bodged fixes for some of the damage sustained by his roll – but the team elected to retire him anyway
“It took out the plenum for the turbo, so that was… broken, been crushed, so it was just a case of making sure nothing goes in the system.”
Tänak had a similar moment to Evans at the hairpin that sent the Toyota on its roof – but Evans argued that trying to countersteer out of the roll would have been a riskier choice.
“It was a very, very blind hairpin,” said Evans. “You don’t really see the apex at all. It started lifting and I wasn’t expecting it would go much more, but it continued to lift. There was nowhere really to countersteer to. It’s a steep bank on the outside.”
