Fierce battle in the opening round of the ERC -a Finnish driver is slightly ahead

The Finnish driver is leading the rally after Saturday’s special stages with a slim margin of 2.3 seconds ahead of Latvian Martins Sesks. Toyota drivers have been battling for the top spot all day. Before the last special stage of the day, Sesks was in the lead, but a tire puncture put Heikkilä back in first place.

However, Heikkilä reported a turbo fault at the finish of Saturday’s final stage. The pop-up valve had been acting up all day.

“I’m really happy for us, we did a good job in this stage. But again – this pop-off is a really stupid thing. At the beginning of an uphill we lost power. We probably lost about 20 seconds today because of that,” Heikkilä lamented.

“I don’t know where it (puncutre) was.. okay. I would say 3 kilometers from the end or something,” said Sesks.

In third place in the rally is Romanian Skoda driver Simone Tempestini, who is only 6.3 seconds behind Heikkilä. New Zealander driving a Hyundai, Hayden Paddon, is in fourth place. The gap to the leader has grown to 12 seconds.

“We have just some tyres left. In all the right handers we had to be calmer and calmer. We managed it pretty well on five tyres,” Paddon reflected.

Polish Miko Marczyk is driving fifth before the host country’s Miklos Csomos. The entire top five are within half a minute of each other, so a tight battle is expected on the final day of the rally. Seventh in the overall competition, Mathieu Franceschi set the fastest time on the day’s final stage, but one roll cost him enough time that the gap to the leader is 37.6 seconds.

The Hungarian ERC round concludes on Sunday, when six more special stages are scheduled. Nearly 90 special stage kilometers are still to come, so nothing is decided yet.

Standings of the Rally Hungary after SS4/13: