WRC Estonia: Rovanpera continues charge, M-Sport suffers double retirement

Rovanpera continued his charge as the Finn picked up a hat-trick of stage wins to hold a 40.8-second lead over Evans with three stages of the gravel event remaining.

Hyundai’s Ott Tanak managed to share a stage win with Rovanpera as the Estonian held onto third, 1m19s adrift, with team-mate Thierry Neuville a further 1m26.4s back in fourth.

Toyota's Takamoto Katsuta is on course to finish fifth ahead of M-Sport’s Adrien Fourmaux, now the sole remaining Ford in the points, after Pierre-Louis Loubet and Gus Greensmith were forced to retire.

Blue skies greeted the drivers but the remnants of Saturday’s rain were evident in the form of large puddles on the day’s opening stage, a short 6.5km technical test.

Rovanpera picked up where he left off on Saturday by taking an 11th stage win of the event as he pipped nearest rival Evans by 0.7s.

Off the back of his stage win in Saturday’s last test, Fourmaux set the third fastest time as he took 3.2s out of Katsuta as the gap in the battle for fifth overall came down to 7.7s.

The Rally1 field successfully completed the stages apart from M-Sport’s Loubet, who hit one of several large rocks lining the road, which caused severe damage to his Puma’s front-left suspension.

Loubet managed to limp to the stage end losing a minute in the process, but the damage was too severe to continue and, without a mid-point service, it was game over. As a result, team-mate Greensmith took over eighth overall in the rally standings.

Ott Tanak, Martin Jarveoja, Hyundai World Rally Team Hyundai i20 N Rally1

Photo by: Austral / Hyundai Motorsport

Rovanpera continued his momentum into stage 20 but, on this occasion, he shared the stage win with Tanak as the pair posted identical times.

Despite the impressive