The opening loop of Friday featured three special stages, and the Finnish driver had no chance of challenging for top positions. Starting second on the road, the Toyota driver reached the midday service in seventh place.
Among the regular WRC Rally1 drivers, only Elfyn Evans – who was first on the road and had to sweep the gravel – was behind Rovanperä, not counting the three M-Sport Ford drivers who retired on the second stage of the morning. Rovanperä is already about 30 seconds off the lead.
“It’s not easy. Especially on the first stage this morning, we lost too much time. It was hard to get into the rhythm – or really, there just wasn’t any rhythm at all. It was difficult to find proper pace,” Rovanperä admitted.
“On the second and third stages we did what we could from this starting position and with the grip we had. Compared to Elfyn, we should be going a bit faster, but not by a huge margin. Based on the times, the road seems to be getting quicker quite a lot.”
Rovanperä experimented with different tyre combinations, running both soft and hard tyres on different axles, but nothing improved the challenging situation.
“On the last stage of the loop, we tried hard tyres on different axles. Still, I couldn’t get any good balance from the car.”
“We’ll try to change the setup a bit for the afternoon, but there’s still a lot of sliding. You just can’t carry speed through the narrow sections – it feels like there’s no room even when going slowly. There just isn’t enough grip,” Rovanperä said.
The same three-stage loop will be run again in the afternoon. Rovanperä doesn’t expect his run to get significantly easier.
“It will probably be a bit better on the wider sections, but in the narrow parts, the smaller cars usually mess up the lines. The afternoon could be just as difficult, but hopefully it’ll be slightly better,” he noted.
After three stages of the tough Sardinian gravel rally, Hyundai’s Adrien Fourmaux leads the standings. He is followed by Thierry Neuville, Sébastien Ogier, Ott Tänak, Sami Pajari, and Takamoto Katsuta. The top six are separated by just over 15 seconds.
