The thrilling three-way fight continued into Saturday where the team faced another eight stages and 108km of hard tarmac racing.
With rain forecast, tyre strategy would prove a key topic: all cars in the top category took wet tyres as part of their package for the morning, although the weather would ultimately stay dry through the first loop.
After a day of many twists and turns – literally and metaphorically – Hyundai i20 N star Neuville held a 4.9sec advantage over Toyota rival Elfyn Evans, provisionally scoring 18 points to boost his championship charge against the Welshman. Eight-time world champion Sébastien Ogier made it two GR Yaris cars inside the top three, ending within 11.6sec of the top spot.
The morning swung in Neuville’s favour thanks to his efforts in preserving his four soft compound Pirelli P Zero tyres. Evans, who had ended Friday tied with the Belgian, dropped 4.7sec across the loop as he struggled to juggle only three softs, two wets and one hard tyre in the absence of forecasted rain.
All three Toyota crews opted to carry four soft and two wet tyres for the repeated afternoon loop while Neuville chose a more diverse package comprising two hards, two softs and two wets.
Neuville’s Saturday standing will earn him 18 points, providing he completes Super Sunday. Evans will receive 15 while Ogier gets 13.
“It’s not a big lead, but we had a great day,” smiled the leader. “Despite a not perfect tyre choice this afternoon we were capable of defending our lead. We need to continue attacking and have a good tyre choice [on Sunday]. It wasn’t easy when the weather wasn’t very easy to judge.”
Evans said: “It’s been a good day and good fun behind the wheel. The margins have been very tight here and we just couldn’t quite match Thierry, who was very fast all day. We had a good start to the afternoon to take the lead – we had the right tyre choice for that stage especially. After that, I think it’s hard to say what the best choice was, as the feeling was pretty good in the car. We just unfortunately fell short at the end of the day. There will be another difficult tyre choice to make to cover the whole final day but we’ll try to make good decisions and give it our best.”
Ott Tänak was fourth, more than a minute further back in another i20. The Estonian was lucky to escape with nothing more than slightly a bent rear wheel when he ran wide on a left-hander and clipped a kerb.
Tänak had 19.9sec in hand over Adrien Fourmaux’s Ford Puma in fifth. Fourmaux was again impressive in his M-Sport machine, taking the fastest time at Smerovišće – Grdanjci to stretch his advantage over Toyota’s third driver Takamoto Katsuta.
Seventh-placed Andreas Mikkelsen suffered another time-consuming overshoot but felt increasingly comfortable aboard his Hyundai by the day’s finish. Grégoire Munster gained more valuable experience in his Puma to end the day eighth while WRC2 stars Nikolay Gryazin and Yohan Rossel completed the leaderboard.
Four more stages lie in wait in Sunday’s finale, with up to 12 championship points still up for grabs. They total 54.78km before the finish in Croatian capital Zagreb.
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