Ogier leads thrilling Monte-Carlo duel
Ogier and Meeke go head-to-head in Monte fight
Kubica's Monte- Carlo goes bust
Robert Kubica is out of Rallye Monte-Carlo after a crash on Friday left his Ford Fiesta RS beyond repair.
The Pole was just 6km into the rally's third stage from Corps to La Salle en Beaumont when his car slipped off an ice-covered section at modest speed and hit a tree.
It was later nudged further into a ditch by Elfyn Evans, whose car slid wide at the same spot.
Kubica and his co-driver Maciej Szczepaniak were uninjured, but after a similar incident at his pre-event test, team engineers found the car's chassis was knocked too far out of shape to restart on Saturday.
"It's very disappointing because we put a lot of effort in to being here," Kubica told wrc.com.
"The road was completely dry before we came to the icy section. We did two corners on the ice and it felt quite okay. Then we arrived at the right-hander and I was just a passenger. The anti-lag was pushing me and unfortunately we slid off the road and hit a tree with the front left."
Hayden Paddon was another driver to hit trouble on the same corner. Running two cars ahead of Kubica in the start order, the Kiwi slid wide and clipped the same tree with his Hyundai i20 [pictured below].
"It's my first time on these icy roads with slick tyres and although I felt I was going pretty slowly around the right-hander I just clipped a tree on the outside," he said.
"I thought it was absolutely nothing and we would get away with it, but we hit the wheel in the wrong place and broke the upright. It was an easy fix, but we didn't have the parts with us so we had to stop. We'll be back out tomorrow to keep fighting and keep learning."
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