WRC
Evans: “Still early days” in title race as pressure intensifies
After admitting EKO Acropolis Rally Greece was a “bad weekend for points”, championship leader Elfyn Evans insists it remains “early days” in the title race.
The Toyota Gazoo Racing driver took a 20-point lead over team-mate Takamoto Katsuta into the previous round in Greece, where the Welshman had earmarked the rough gravel stages as potentially the most punishing of the season from which to open the road.
Despite the tricky conditions, Evans coped admirably with the road-sweeping duties he faced on Friday, when five of the six stages were first pass only. By Saturday afternoon, he had climbed from seventh to fifth before a puncture on stage 13 dropped him back down the order.
Another tyre deflation on Sunday cost Evans more valuable time, leaving him seventh on the road and facing the prospect of his championship lead being cut to just seven points. However, post-rally one-minute penalties for Hyundai’s Adrien Fourmaux and M-Sport Ford’s Josh McErlean lifted Evans back to fifth — a result that could prove important come the end of the year.
The reshuffle handed Evans four additional points, the same margin by which he lost last year’s title to Sébastien Ogier, and extended his advantage over Katsuta back to 11 points. The pressure is nevertheless starting to build, with Ogier’s bid for a 10th world crown gathering momentum after a perfect 35-point haul in Greece moved the Frenchman to within 37 points of Evans in third place.
Reflecting on the title race, Evans is refusing to pay too much attention to his rivals.
“It [leading the championship] doesn’t mean a lot and of course it has been a bad weekend in terms of points, but it is early days still,” said Evans. “It doesn’t mean too much at the moment. We have just got to go to Estonia and do what we can there.
“I didn’t have a lot of expectations coming in and it was a little bit frustrating, of course, as things were starting to look okay by Saturday afternoon. But that puncture did a lot of damage to where we were overall. On Sunday, I did the damage [by hitting a bank and knocking a tyre off the rim]. It was a bit like that.”
Now well versed in opening the road on gravel rallies, having faced a similar task during last year’s ultimately unsuccessful bid for a maiden world title, Evans admitted it was difficult to judge whether he had made further progress in Greece.
“After Portugal it was quite clear, it [my road opening] was better [than last year],” he added. “Here in Greece, it was so extreme on Friday, so it was a really difficult one to judge.
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“There were some stages where we did as much as we could and there were some stages where I felt we could have done more. When you are first on the road, you almost have to be perfect if you want to be in with a shot. You only have to have a bit of bad rhythm on top of the extreme road cleaning and then it is completely finished.”
With the rough gravel of EKO Acropolis Rally Greece behind him, Evans’ next task is the fast gravel of Delfi Rally Estonia from 17 - 19 July.
“We will have a completely different mentality when we go to Estonia,” Evans added.
“It can be tough there as it can be very dry and it will depend a lot on the stages that they pick to run on the first day, which I have no idea about yet as I haven’t looked. It will be what it will be. We have to try and prepare well, which is always important for fast rallies.”
