Evans lost ground to Solberg but has stretched ahead of S\u00e9bastien Ogier in their battle for second; now holding a 26.6s advantage over the Frenchman who chose to take it easy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI back off,\u201d Ogier explained. \u201cI was not wanting to go for that condition. It was basically undrivable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Evans added: \u201cUnbelievable, really unbelievable. You think it\u2019s improving and then you just get this nervous\u00a0twitch from the car immediately, it\u2019s horrible.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople always say it\u2019s the worst stage, it\u2019s very close this one\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Thierry Neuville suffered a spin, remarking: \u201cI was a passenger from the beginning to the end. I had no control.\u201d\u00a0Team-mate Adrien Fourmaux also put his\u00a0Hyundai into a pirouette but set the fourth fastest time, as Gr\u00e9goire Munster went fifth quickest despite a spin of his own.<\/p>\n
Munster leapt ahead of Takamoto Katsuta on the stage; the Toyota driver\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAaron did a good job,\u201d Katsuta said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t\u00a0get info from gravel crew, we were missing the last few kilometers, so he did his best and tried to do it [on his phone].\u201d<\/p>\n
Hayden Paddon dropped outside the top 10 as he lost over four minutes sliding\u00a0off 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Evans lost ground to Solberg but has stretched ahead of S\u00e9bastien Ogier in their battle for second; now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[144347,144348,111,139,69,213,87700,139135],"class_list":{"0":"post-251470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-monte-carlo-rally","9":"tag-monte-carlo-rally-2026","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-wrc","15":"tag-wrc-2026"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251470","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=251470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}