2025 Safari Rally Kenya -Saturday Report
Elfyn Evans is ready to extend the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) lead after surviving on a confusing Saturday in Safari Rally Kenya, and finished the second leg with a minute 57.4 seconds.
Fortune once again preferred Wales far away with the legendary endurance test of Africa, another cruel help in college. From the dried dust bowl to the rainy mud, the day showed the overall spectrum of the safari extremes. Evans was one of the minority people who coordinated.
He started on Saturday with a slim 7.7 second buffer, but immediately placed a marker in a sleeping warrior opener. At the end of the 26.97 kilometer test, he still extended his lead to 8.2sec against Toyota Gazoo race team colleague Kalle Rovanperä.
Rovanperä ‘reaction was quickly solved. 5 km away from the end of Elmenteita, the right tire deflation cost 21.1Sec, worsened in Soysambu, and the left heater was 55.5 seconds lower. At noon, his deficit for Evans became tight at 1 minute 32.5 seconds.
Then it rained.
The condition worsened in the repeated afternoon loop, and Lawvan Ferra was the second pass of the sleep warrior, but he arrived at the end of the damaged rear suspension cancer. The modification of the temporary roadside related to the ratchet strap continued, but there was no choice but to go through the last two steps, and it dropped for almost five minutes and slipped from OTT Tänak, Thierry Neuville and Takamoto Katsuta.
Arriving in Kenya, who has a 28 -point championship lead, Evans has now greatly strengthened the title advantage that is far from his first Safari rally and wounded on Sunday. It is not a future conclusion. His toyota grinys rally1 suffered a right -hand damage to the right after a while in the last stage. It is a timely recall of how the event can withdraw.
The drama did not stop with Rovanperä. Almost all Rally1 Frontrunner faced any form of adversity in a classic safari manner.
The second deployed Tänak lost time with an early contracted tire, and then in SS12, the windscreen of modern i20 N rally1 was inevitably visible. Nevertheless, he is holding a 2:36.0 second cushion in the five -stage finale on Sunday through his teammate Neuville.
Neuville’s day was simple. Two holes, fog windscreens and late days later, the wrong engine was combined to delay charging. But he was still in the final test when Katsuta was forced to stop the wheels and change the wheels.
Japanese drivers are also fighting for illness, and his stage victory is even more impressive.
Sami Pajari brought Toyota to 6th place for 54.4 seconds than Rovanperä, but was more than four minutes from Ford Puma Rally1 in Grégoire Munster. MUNSTER started a day on the 11th and even won the stage on SS15.
Gus Green Smith (škoda Fabia RS Rally2) stole the WRC2 lead of Jan Solans (Toyota GR YARIS) at the last stage of the day and ranked eighth in the process. The pair is separated on Sunday in just 5.8 seconds, and the total five stages are almost 66km.
Naveen Pulligilla in India took the lead in the WRC3 class in Ford Fiesta Rally3 ahead of the Kenyan driver Nikhil Sachania on a similar car on Saturday.
