This season goes from crazier to crazier.
Rally Croatia's new route saw the interesting challenge of tarmac roads flanked by gravelly edges, meaning some stages felt like gravel stages on a second pass, rather than just being a bit messy. This contributed to a few rally defining punctures and general chaos that decimated the 9-car Rally1 field.
Oliver Solberg crashed out less than 5km into the first stage after an innocuous slide hit the rock wall and sent him into a ditch. Elfyn Evans then uncharacteristically misheard a pacenote and flew off into the bushes at a tighter corner than he planned and was also out.
M-Sport has a miserable time with punctures, cockpit fires and Armstrong retiring on an early stage too.
Day 2 and Formaux retired due to a crash as well, while punctures for surprise rally leader Pajari, Katsuta, Paddon and M-Sport again made Neville the comfortable Rally leader.
Going into Sunday and Neville, Katsuta, Pajari and Paddon were the only Rally1 cars in the top 10 and ahead of the WRC2 cars. While the SuperRally crews sent it for Super Sunday and Power Stage points, the top 4 were too far apart due to number of punctures to really challenge each other and just had to (relatively) cruise to the end.
Hyundai, needing a win against the dominant Toyota's relied on their former champion, but cruelly on the final stage, Neville clipped a sign and broke his front suspension. After losing over 20 minutes scraping the damaged car to the finish, Neuville dropped out of the points, handing victory to a surprised Katsuta, his second win in two rallies.
Takamoto Katsuta is now the surprise Championship leader after the double disasters for Evans and Solberg in the last two rounds. Pajari scored another podium after his awful Monte Carlo Rally, and it was a first podium since 2018 for Hayden Paddon, doing his job well to at least pick up some silverware for the understandably distraught Hyundai team.
All this attention meant Lancia, who scored their first WRC2 win with the new Ypsilon, was an amazing 4th overall. Is this the best result for a WRC2 car? (Genuine question, anyone who knows please enlighten me). Either way, the biggest winners from this rally are Katsuta and Sebastien Ogier, who made this an event he skipped and didn't lose much to his main title rivals. Has Katsuta joined that list of rivals now? We will find out in the Canary Islands in 2 weeks time.
