Sebastien Ogier and Vincent Landais lead Rally de Portugal after Friday’s seven stages, heading Thierry Neuville and Martijn Wydaeghe by 3.7 seconds with Sami Pajari and Marko Salminen in third overall, 15.2 seconds off the lead.
“We didn’t have the best stage at the beginning, and we collected a lot of dust. I’m happy to finish the day. Tomorrow is the start of a new rally. I think we can be happy with what we have done this afternoon as the morning was tricky,” Ogier said at the final stop control.
Oliver Solberg and Elliot Edmondson are fourth, just 1.2 seconds behind their Finnish teammate. Elfyn Evans and Scott Martin, who opened the road since stage one on Thursday are 28.1 seconds from the lead of the rally, making it four Toyotas in the top five.
Solberg survived a heart stopping moment in stage 8 when bedrock flung his GR Yaris off the road at a near 45º angle, rearing up before settling into an open field, from where he was able to recover to the road. He lost just under nine seconds but lived to fight another day.
Adrien Fourmaux and Alexandre Coria took the lead in the day’s opening stage until, moments after Solberg, they had a carbon copy moment but they weren’t as lucky and suffered a double right-hand puncture which cost the French pairing just under half a minute as they limped through the final kilometers of the stage. The i20 N pair plummeted from first to sixth in the overall classification and drove with caution over the remaining stages as they were out of spare tyres.
Takamoto Katsuta and Aaron Johnston, second in the championship standings and running second on the road, lost time and ended the day in seventh position overall.
Dani Sordo and Candido Carrera had an iffy day battling with handling issues related to their tyre choice, ending in eighth with Josh McErlean and Eoin Treacy heading the M-Sport Ford challenge in ninth. McErlean earned a 50 second penalty for leaving the remote service five minutes late after his car refused to fire up.
Jon Armstrong suffered power steering failure on the liaison section en route to the remote service and with no parts available for a repair, he had to complete four stages wrestling with his Puma. Arm strong!
Martins Sesks and Renars Francis had a slow start to Rally de Portugal having been out of the car for a couple of month; the Latvian kicked things up a gear after the service break and set top three and four stage times before a double puncture in the final stage dropped them from ninth to 18th, two places behind Armstrong. Incredibly, the double puncture occurred in the same place as last year.
“I don’t know what I have done to this stage. I have done nothing. We changed the tyre in the same place as last year”, Sesks lamented.
In WRC2, Nikolay Gryazin showed the strength of the Lancia Ypsilon, leading the 42-car strong category from Jan Solans’ Skoda Fabia and Roope Korhonen in the leading Toyota GR Yaris. The Lancia driver isn’t nominated to score points on this event.
The early pacesetter Alejandro Cachon was forced to retire on the way to stage eight with a failed alternator.
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