Day three of Rally Finland will start with a Elfyn Evans in control of a rally that has claimed it’s causalities already.
Evans elevated to the lead of the Secto-rally Finland after teammate Kalle Rovanperä rolled his Yaris and retired from the event in the Friday afternoon loop.
The Welshman starts day three with a 6.9seconds lead over Hyundai’s Thierry Neuville.
“We are pretty happy overall and obviously we have still got a lot of driving to do,” said Evans.
Rovanpera who was leading the rally by 5.7seconds by stage 7 had an impressive performance come to an end in stage eight after a roll; an incident he termed stupid from their side.
Rovanpera joined Hyundai’s Esapekka Lappi and M-Sport Ford’s Ott Tanak and Pierre-Louis Loubet who has earlier retired out of the event in the morning loop of Friday.
Despite reporting mechanical glitches, and struggling with visibility on stages, Thierry Neuville maintained his podium position by end of leg two. Neuville however has Takamoto Katsuta breathing down neck into the third leg.
Teemu Suninen is chasing from the fourth position followed by Jari-Matti Latvala who is experiencing the Hybrid Rally1 car for the first time.
In the WRC2, Jari Huttunen in a Skoda Fabia leads the category and stands sixth overall. Nikolay Gryazin, Oliver Solberg and Andrien Fourmaux complete the top ten in that order.
