S\u00e9bastien Ogier heads into the final day of Rally Islas Canarias with just a 3.8-second advantage over Toyota team-mate Oliver Solberg, as Jon Armstrong flirted with disaster on the day\u2019s final stage.<\/p>\n
Ogier had led the fifth round of this year\u2019s world championship since Friday morning, but hasn\u2019t been able to relax with his young team-mate mirroring his every move.<\/p>\n
The reigning champion started Saturday 8.9 seconds ahead of the Monte Carlo winner, but lost 3.6s over the course of the morning to carry a 5.3s advantage into the afternoon.<\/p>\n
Gaps were extremely close on SS12 with Solberg nicking a tenth of a second from Ogier, before the pair incredibly set an equal time on SS13.<\/p>\n
That gave Ogier a 5.2s advantage ahead of the event\u2019s longest stage, but when his tires began to overheat Solberg just sent it, and nicked 1.4s from Ogier to slash the lead down to under four seconds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a horrible stage but eventually when the tires went I thought \u2018ah I\u2019ll got for it\u2019,\u201d said Solberg. \u201cAfrica was bad luck and Croatia was my fault, so I won\u2019t panic\u00a0to take him, but let\u2019s see. It\u2019s four long stages to go, and anything is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ogier countered: \u201cI\u2019m excited for tomorrow \u2013 finally some new stages, it\u2019ll be nice to drive. That\u2019s the reason we are here: if we don\u2019t enjoy this fight, we might as well stay at home.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"S\u00e9bastien Ogier heads into the final day of Rally Islas Canarias with just a 3.8-second advantage over Toyota…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,205173,205174,213,87700,139135],"class_list":["post-398662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-rally-islas-canarias","tag-rally-islas-canarias-2026","tag-sports","tag-wrc","tag-wrc-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398662","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=398662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}