Sébastien Ogier stretched his Rally Italia Sardegna lead on Saturday morning as Hyundai’s Adrien Fourmaux and Ott Tänak both ran into problems in the punishing island stages.
Ogier’s 2.1 second overnight lead stretched to 7.4 seconds after winning Saturday’s opening stage, beating this Toyota Gazoo Racing teammate Kalle Rovanperä by 3.1 seconds, while Hyundai’s Ott Tänak and Adrien Fourmaux finished third and fourth respectively.
Tänak fought back on stage eight, cutting the Frenchman’s lead to 4.5 seconds but on the second stage of the day Fourmaux picked up a puncture dropping off the podium. Tänak and Rovanperä moved up into the provisional overall podium standings with Sami Pajari holding an excellent fourth overall, ahead of Elfyn Evans and Takamoto Katsuta.
Ogier was a on a mission on the final stage of the morning loop, heading his Estonian rival by 10 seconds as Tänak had to deal with a deflating tyre, to take a 15 second advantage into the afternoon loop.
Fourmaux’s day went from bad to worse after he ran wide in stage nine, losing another chunk of time.
Tänak reminded everyone he was still in the chase for the win taking the fastest time in stage ten, but only shaved 0.6 seconds off Ogier’s fairly comfortable lead.
Tänak took a big bite out of Ogier’s lead on stage 11, pulling the gap back to 10.7 seconds with one stage remaining.
Evans helped himself to fourth overall after stage 11 at Pajari’s expense, while on the final stage, Ogier took the scratch time again, 0.4 seconds up on the chasing Hyundai.
Rovanperä, Evans and Pajari held station ahead of the WRC2 leader Nikolay Gryazin, who was followed by the recovering Katsuta who dropped down the order after his Friday roll.
Oliver Solberg, Emil Lindholm and Lauri Joona rounded out the top ten with four stages remaining on Sunday.
