Evans lost ground to Solberg but has stretched ahead of Sébastien Ogier in their battle for second; now holding a 26.6s advantage over the Frenchman who chose to take it easy.
“I back off,” Ogier explained. “I was not wanting to go for that condition. It was basically undrivable.”
Evans added: “Unbelievable, really unbelievable. You think it’s improving and then you just get this nervous twitch from the car immediately, it’s horrible.
“People always say it’s the worst stage, it’s very close this one…”
Thierry Neuville suffered a spin, remarking: “I was a passenger from the beginning to the end. I had no control.” Team-mate Adrien Fourmaux also put his Hyundai into a pirouette but set the fourth fastest time, as Grégoire Munster went fifth quickest despite a spin of his own.
Munster leapt ahead of Takamoto Katsuta on the stage; the Toyota driver’s navigator Aaron Johnston reading from his phone instead of the pacenote book towards the end of the stage, enabling him to give Katsuta the latest information from the route note crew.
“Aaron did a good job,” Katsuta said. “We didn’t get info from gravel crew, we were missing the last few kilometers, so he did his best and tried to do it [on his phone].”
Hayden Paddon dropped outside the top 10 as he lost over four minutes sliding off the road before spectators pushed him back on again. Sami Pajari crashed out early on the test, running wide into a snowbank and then hitting a tree.