\u201cI can see nothing compared to him,\u201d Solberg argued. \u201cIt\u2019s stupid to put the stage in this period into the dark, it should just be the same for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
Things were the same for everybody\u00a0on the final stage, but Solberg elected to take it easy and protect the lead he had built. That lead stands at 1m08.4s after nine stages.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just wanted to get through this one, there\u2019s so much happening,\u201d Solberg said. \u201cIt was clean, I\u2019m through, I extended my lead today so it\u2019s been a fantastic day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ogier set his second fastest time in a row, and third of the weekend, on SS9, clawing another 12.1s from Evans to close to just 6.5s overnight. At lunchtime, Ogier had been 35.7s behind.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe tried to have a better afternoon,\u201d admitted the reigning world champion. \u201cThis was the first loop of the rally where we could finally be faster \u2013 no slush on the road, the rest was just mad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Evans confessed: \u201c\u201dI obviously wasn\u2019t brave enough, not going well enough in the ruts. Not ideal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI can see nothing compared to him,\u201d Solberg argued. \u201cIt\u2019s stupid to put the stage in this period…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[144347,144348,111,139,69,213,87700,139135],"class_list":["post-248464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-monte-carlo-rally","tag-monte-carlo-rally-2026","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports","tag-wrc","tag-wrc-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}