Sebastien Ogier and Takamoto Katsuta take the responsibility for their retirements on the opening day of Rally Paraguay explaining their incidents.
The first victim of Rally Paraguay was Takamoto Katsuta who rolled his Yaris just two kilometers into Stage 1 when he lost the rear before his having hit a ditch. Unfortunately, Toyota was forced to lose another car as Sebastien Ogier was forced to stop at 12,7Km into SS3 due to the fact that the suspension repair gave away. In fact, the Frenchman hit a bank in Stage 2 and got a front left puncture, therefore he had to stop to change a wheel. This was his second puncture of the day as he firstly suffered from a rear left slow puncture in Stage 1. Moreover, it must be mentioned that he dropped more than five minutes in Stage 3 as the suspension arm was broken. However, he and Vincent Landais made some repairs on the road section before the start of Stage 3, but eventually their efforts went down the drain as they retired in SS3. Both of them will restart on Saturday under the SuperRally regulations as Toyota confirmed the news via its press release.
"Unfortunately this rally quickly turned out to be very challenging for us", Ogier said.
"In the first stage we got a puncture on a landing from a jump, and we also had a bit of an electronic issue going into the next stage.
"I maybe lost concentration a bit, came a bit too fast over a crest and hit the bank on the outside; it was my mistake and we damaged the front-left suspension.
"We tried to fix it and continue, but eventually we had to stop for the day".
On the other hand, Katsuta stated: "At the beginning of the first stage there was a very high-speed approach down into the forest and I probably just came too fast into this corner; it was my mistake.
"I lost the rear of the car and wasn’t able to recover it and we rolled.
"Initially we tried to continue but we stopped to prevent any further damage.
"I’m really sorry for the team and it’s a tough moment but we will try to regroup".
Photo Credits: Toyota
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