After the second day of the Croatia Rally, Thierry Neuville and co-driver Maritjn Wydaeghe still hold the first place with a 4,9 second lead over the second duo Elfyn Evans and co-driver Scott Martin. Sébastien Ogier and co-driver Vincent Landais are third, 6,7 seconds behind Evans.
After dropping a little time at the start of the special stage before the hard compound tyres warmed up, Neuville threw everything at delivering his second stage win on this 9,11 km test. Doing so with a whoop in the cockpit by a margin of half a second, this means that co-driver Martijn Wydaeghe must fulfil his pledge to buy a Porsche 911 in celebration of their double success!
„It’s not a big lead but it’s been a great day despite a not perfect tyre choice this afternoon we were capable of defending our position and two times fastest here on this stage so he needs to open the wallet now! He’s paid enough… Tomorrow we continue attacking we have a good feeling and make the right tyre choice. This wasn’t great this afternoon so it wasn’t easy, the weather was very difficult to judge and we did what we could with what we had this afternoon and we were capable of keeping our lead so we are happy with that”, said leader Neuville.
„It’s been good fun. What can I say I mean it’s been a good day, some good driving but I couldn’t quite follow Thierry I mean the margins are tight here, yeah, it didn’t quite work out. Just keep driving, hopefully make some good decisions with the tyres and try our best“, said runner-up Evans.
Nikolay Gryazin and co-driver Konstantin Aleksandrov remain WRC2 leaders with a lead of 39,5 seconds in the Citroën C3 Rally2. Yohan Rossel and co-driver Arnaud Dunand are second in the standings after a total of 16 special stages, while Pepe López and David Vázquez sta yin third place.
Romet Jürgenson and Siim Oja are the fastest in the JWRC category in a Ford Fiesta Rally3 with 2:09,4s lead, followed by Taylor Gill and Daniel Brkic in the same car. Croatian duo Viliam Prodan and Marko Stiperski 29th are in the overall standings.
Special stages today were driven through two counties, Karlovačka and Zagrebačka. Tomorrow we have an exciting finale with four special stages through Krapinsko-Zagorska and Varaždinska counties, to Trakošćan - Vrbno and Zagorska Sela - Kumrovec. The ceremonial finish is expected around 16:00 in Zagreb, in front of the INA building.
