Rally Japan – SS18: Ogier continues to push, Evans still in the lead

After setting the fastest time on the first pass through Kuragaike Park during SS17, Sébastien Ogier Vincent Landais and his teammates repeated their performance in SS18 before returning to service for 15 minutes of mechanical work. In this stage, they finished ahead of Oliver Solberg and Elliott Edmondson (by seven-tenths of a second) and Elfyn Evans and Scott Martin (by 1,1 seconds). At the end of this stage, Solberg and Edmondson lead the Super Sunday standings and are currently the best team in the standings for the day.

With this new scratch time, Sébastien Ogier and Vincent Landais maintain the pressure on Elfyn Evans and Scott Martin: the gap between the two crews is now 15,5 seconds, a lot and a little at the same time, with almost 35 kilometers still to go in this rallySami Pajari and Marko Salminen are getting even closer to the final podium, still occupying 3rd place with a 19,1 second lead over Takamoto Katsuta and Aaron Johnston, the two crews having recorded the exact same time in this special stage.

Katsuta and Johnston, however, had a close call in SS18, running slightly wide on a left-hand corner and hitting the right rear rim of their Toyota The GR Yaris Rally1 incident thankfully had no consequences. In WRC2, the magnificent battle between Nikolay Gryazin and Alejandro Cachón continues: after neutralizing each other in SS17, this time the Lancia Corse driver has gained a tenth of a second on the Toyota GR Yaris Rally2 driver. The overall gap between them is now 5,7 seconds, the same as at the start of this morning's stage.

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WRC – Rally Japan
The classification of ES18 (Rally1)

The overall standings after SS18 (Rally1)

The overall standings after SS18 (WRC2)