Sebastien Ogier says that he could not do anything different in Powerstage and some of the Sunday stages did not suit to Toyota, but he will try to keep the performance he had on the next WRC events.
The Frenchman was leading Rally Italia Sardegna from Stage 1 to Stage 4 and dropped behind Ott Tanak in Stage 5 as the first one lost some seconds when he suffered from a rear right puncture on the first pass from Tempio Pausania. He managed to retake the lead in Stage 6, but again he lost his first place over Tanak on the final two stages of Saturday morning. After Thierry Neuville's accident in Stage 8, Tanak decided to follow a safe approach on Saturday afternoon and eventually he slipped behind Ogier who was the leader from Stage 9 to 15. On Sunday, Ogier was managing his lead over Tanak who focused on SuperSunday points and was able to cut his rival's lead from 17,1 to 6,2 seconds before the start of Powerstage. The Hyundai driver was aiming to score some bonus points for the championship and was not able to match Neuville's pace in PS, but the good news came for him when Ogier completed Powerstage 6,4 seconds slower than him due to a puncture which happened three kilometers before the end of PS, thus Tanak won this year's Rally Italia Sardegna for two tenths of a second and secured his first victory of the season with Hyundai. Finally, it must be mentioned that Ogier was very close in breaking another record this season as he and Sebastien Loeb have won four times the Italian WRC round and are the drivers with the most victories there.
"We knew it could be tough yesterday with some stages that are very rough and maybe not the most suited to us", Ogier said.
"Still, I think we were doing a good enough job to secure the win, but unfortunately we started to lose tyre pressure three kilometres from the end.
"The conditions were very extreme in this Power Stage, even worse than we have seen there before, and I don’t think there was much that I could have done differently.
"It’s something that’s never easy to take, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really change anything in terms of the overall points for the team.
"I think I can still be happy with the weekend I’ve done, and sometimes motorsport just doesn’t go your way.
"We will come back and try to keep up this level of performance we’ve had".
Photo Credits: Toyota
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