Sebastien Ogier holds a 16.3-second lead after the first full day of Rally Finland, but the story of Friday was not the Frenchman's pace. It was the weather that arrived just after SS7 Saarikas started at 3.49pm, and the argument it started about whether the World Rally Championship should have kept running at all.
Ogier, reunited for a one-off with title-winning co-driver Julien Ingrassia, took the lead on Friday's opening test and never gave it up. Behind him the leaderboard was turned upside down. Adrien Fourmaux, seventh on the road and therefore last into the worst of it, lost 1m29.8s and slid to seventh. Takamoto Katsuta dropped more than two minutes on SS8 Sydanmaa with a misted windscreen. Thierry Neuville, already down 1m45s from a separate off before service, ended the day ninth. Elfyn Evans, who caught the conditions at a kinder moment on one stage and the worst of them on the next, climbed to second.
"It's been a very good day - very tricky this afternoon, not so enjoyable I guess for anybody but it's good that we managed to come out of that," Ogier said.
Evans, the championship leader, was blunter at the stage end. "It shouldn't have happened, that's the bottom line," he told the stage-end reporter. "When conditions are like this, somebody has to use a little bit of common sense. We don't want to stop for a bit of rain but when you can't see the road and the car is aquaplaning everywhere, I think a bit of common sense is needed."
Speaking later to DirtFish, Evans described what he actually saw. "It rained like so heavy just a minute before we were due into the stage. And when we set off down the first straight, I really could only just about make the green of the edge of the road out - the rain was that intense." He added that some had it far worse: "Taka has probably had the worst of it. So, you know, it's a bit of a lottery when it's like this, but, you know, happy to get through it."
Neuville went further, drawing a comparison with the rest of the sport. "I just think that conditions like this, no other motorsport would have continued in that condition," the Hyundai driver told DirtFish. "Now it's always hard to predict and obviously a few cars were through, but if you look the onboard, my onboard, from the start the first five-six kilometers, you need big, big balls to drive that fast in those conditions."
Asked directly whether it was unsafe, he did not hedge. "I didn't feel safe, let's say, while driving. Definitely not. I didn't know what were the conditions for the other drivers, so that was the only reason I had to carry on." His fix is a procedural one: "There's enough people watching TV and around the stages who should be able to judge when it's safe and not safe."
Oliver Solberg, running fourth and dealing with water pouring into his Toyota through a roof vent, put it in the starkest terms of anyone. "If you think Africa was dangerous, yeah, this was mad dangerous," he said. "You do 200 kilometers an hour, full of water in the car, wipers are full, you see nothing, absolutely nothing from the start. I was flat on the straights, had no clue where I was, and still I lost a minute, yeah? So it's just, that was a little bit unsafe. It was a bit stupid."
M-Sport's Josh McErlean agreed it crossed a line, and credited an improvised fix for saving his rally. "For me, it was definitely too dangerous. Whenever you actually can't see, then there's a problem. But anyway, if we hadn't had this selfie stick, then we would have had to stop for sure and lost a lot more time."
Not everyone framed it as a safety failure. Ogier, long one of the most vocal advocates for equal conditions in rallying, was more fatalistic about the lottery - while conceding where it ended up. "Obviously it's always a shame when the field cannot battle with the same condition. It's often the case in rally obviously, it's not the circuit racing where you go through all together the same condition," he said. "You can complain but for sure at some point it became very, very difficult to drive and close to survival. So in this moment for sure yeah, the main thing is there's nothing bad happen because it was very tricky."
Sami Pajari, who had been challenging Ogier for the lead before the rain, lost his shot to a mechanical detail rather than a judgement call. "We lost the game for the win on that one stage," the Finn said. "The blower wasn't working and we didn't realize it, so we had full mist on the windscreen. It's a big shame but still we are in a fight for the podium positions."
Pajari sits second-quickest of the chasers at 26.7s off the lead, with Solberg fourth and M-Sport's Martins Sesks fifth. Robert Virves leads WRC2 by 13.5s from Roope Korhonen and rounds out the overall top ten.
Sources: DirtFish, WRC.com, RACER, Motorsport.com.
---
*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/ogier-leads-rally-finland-as-drivers-slam-mad-dangerous-deluge). Visit for full coverage.*