The Frenchman’s trophy cabinet currently holds seven third-place finishes from WRC events. Now, with more than half of this weekend’s Rally Paraguay completed, Fourmaux is in second place.
But the Hyundai driver has a formidable challenger right behind him – eight-time world champion Sébastien Ogier. The Toyota star lost more than half a minute with a puncture on Friday, but since then he has mounted an impressive charge back towards the front.
Ogier sits third overall, just half a second behind Fourmaux heading into Saturday afternoon’s loop.
“It’s nice to have a fight with Seb, but I would like to keep him behind,” Fourmaux said.
During the morning loop, Ogier closed the gap on his fellow Frenchman on every stage. That means Fourmaux needs to find more pace if he wants to hold on to second place.
“It’s two, three seconds, but every time he’s catching a little bit. So I will try something else maybe on the setup for the second pass to see if we can improve our pace,” he explained.
“I think I’m doing quite well on driving, but the times are not really there. We need to understand why in these places we lose time,” Fourmaux added.
On Friday, Fourmaux had even led the gravel rally, before a puncture dropped him behind Toyota’s Kalle Rovanperä. By the time the crews reached mid-day service on Saturday, Rovanperä had extended his lead over the Frenchman to 16.7 seconds.
Instead of chasing Rovanperä, Fourmaux is now focused on resisting Ogier’s pressure.
“Maybe we can find some good setup and we can be on the pace of Seb. For Kalle, he is now quite far. We need a mistake from him or a puncture,” Fourmaux admitted honestly.
Rally Paraguay continues with four more stages on Saturday. The event concludes on Sunday.
