Tanak runs first again in Argentina

Ott Tanak will open the road on the final six stages of Philips Rally Argentina, the second day in a row that he has started first on the fifth round of the FIA World Rally Championship powered by Nokia.

The Estonian is 17th in the overall classification after incurring significant time penalties following his retirement on Friday morning.

Driving an M-Sport Ford Fiesta RS WRC, Tanak will be followed through Sunday’s stages by Brazilian drivers Paulo Nobre and Daniel Oliveira, who line up for WRC Team MINI Portugal and Brazil World Rally Team respectively.

After completing Saturday’s competitive action, Tanak said: “For sure today has been a lot better than yesterday. We set some good times in the morning and I have had a good feeling in the car. The road position hasn’t been ideal, but today has just been about getting through the stages. We had to write completely new pace notes for this rally so we are just using the remaining stages to develop the notes and get as much experience of the stages as we can.”

Behind Nobre, Eliseo Salazar starts fourth on the road in his Prodrive-run MINI John Cooper Works WRC with Nasser Al-Attiyah restarting in fifth under Rally 2 rules after he retired his Qatar World Rally Team Citroen DS3 WRC with damaged suspension on Saturday.

Evgeny Novikov goes sixth in his M-Sport Fiesta with factory Ford driver Petter Solberg seventh and Armindo Araujo eighth. Thierry Neuville is ninth on the road for the Citroen Junior World Rally Team with Martin Prokop 10th and Mads Ostberg 11th.

Dani Sordo starts 12th in his works Fiesta with Mikko Hirvonen 13th and his Citroen Total World Rally Team team-mate and rally leader Sebastien Loeb 14th.

Sunday’s action begins with the monster 65.74-kilometre Matadero/Ambul stage at 08:00hrs local time.