Jon Armstrong's first WRC outing in Rally1 machinery ended in cruel fashion at Rally Portugal on Saturday afternoon, the M-Sport Ford driver rolling his Puma Rally1 just 600 metres into Stage 15, Felgueiras 2. Both Armstrong and his co-driver Shane Byrne climbed out of the car uninjured, but the Northern Irishman's debut top-flight WRC weekend was effectively over with two days still to run.
Armstrong had been one of the stories of the rally before the incident. Promoted into a full Rally1 programme by M-Sport for Portugal, he had spent Friday navigating gravel he had never seen at full Rally1 pace, recovering after a power steering failure on the afternoon loop and battling back into the points to run 10th overall heading into Saturday morning. The pace was eye-catching, the management nerveless. Then SS15 happened.
Speaking after climbing from the upturned Puma, Armstrong was clear about how the moment unfolded - and unusually clear-eyed for a driver still picking gravel out of his hair.
"So when we came through this left into right over a small crest, just the rear stepped out quite quickly and then touched the bank and put the car into a roll on the road," Armstrong said.
The driver attributed the moment to a misread of the available grip on a stage that had been slowed by the passage of earlier traffic and was carrying remnants of the morning's rain. The bank he clipped was soft, but the contact was just enough to spin the rear of the Puma into a rotational roll that came to rest on the road surface. The team's social media channels later confirmed the body damage was significant but the car would be recovered for assessment overnight.
"A proper baptism of fire for our first WRC event in the Rally1 car, we were happy to show some good pace throughout the weekend," Armstrong said.
The crash reshuffled the rally fight at the front. Sebastien Ogier, who had spent the morning loop chipping at Oliver Solberg's Friday-built lead, used the afternoon to take outright control. The Toyota man swung 3.9 seconds clear of Pajari at the head of the leaderboard, with Solberg dropping to fifth after a front-right puncture forced an unscheduled tyre change.
"I was on a bit of a push now, we knew we needed to respond. It's going to be interesting," Ogier said after the stage that flipped the rally onto its head.
The flow of the day told the story of a rally tilting decisively. Hyundai's pace from Friday could not be replicated; Ogier's experience and the Toyota's tyre management combined to give the Frenchman the kind of buffer that has so often defined his Rally Portugal weekends.
For Armstrong and M-Sport, the focus now turns to Rally Sweden, where the squad's Rally1 programme reportedly continues. The Northern Irishman has long been earmarked as a Rally1 hopeful by team principal Malcolm Wilson, and Saturday's accident, however unwelcome, will not derail those plans. The pace he showed before the crash, including stage times in among the established Rally1 frontrunners, was the headline M-Sport had been waiting to write.
---