Sébastien Ogier secured his third victory in four 2018 WRC events on Sunday afternoon.
Leading by 44.5s coming into the final two stages on Sunday, the Frenchman made no mistakes on his way to claiming the victory on his home event.
After leading throughout the weekend, Ogier continued to control his lead margin, eventually finishing 36.1s ahead of Ott Tänak in second.
Ogier, who now leads the championship by 17 points, said on his weekend: “I’m very happy with our performance here. It was a great, great day on Friday and that’s where we built the platform for this win. It’s never easy controlling your pace rather than driving flat out, but everything feels better and better in this car.”
Photo Credit: Jaanus Ree/Red Bull Content Pool
Tänak in second saw himself in a close battle with Thierry Neuville coming into Sunday, but the Fin managed to eventually pull 31.4s ahead of the Belgian after the Hyundai driver suffered engine problems on the final ‘power’ stage, but he did manage to hold on to third overall.
Fourth was the second Hyundai of Dani Sordo who was also in a close battle, this time with Elfyn Evans in the second M-Sport Ford. The pair had diced together all weekend and the Spaniard would eventually come out on top, finishing just 3.5 seconds ahead of the Welshman.
Sixth at the end of the rally was Power Stage winner Esapekka Lappi who looked set to finish higher up the leaderboard before hitting a kerb on stage 11 forcing him to stop and change his tyre, while Andreas Mikkelsen rounded out the top 8 overall with him suffering a string of handling problems with the i20 WRC.
Photo Credit: Jaanus Ree/Red Bull Content Pool
WRC2 winner Jan Kopecký finished ninth overall ahead of the returning Kris Meeke who restarted under Rally2 rules after crashing out on the final stage on Saturday afternoon. Yoann Bonato secured second for the new Citoren C3 R5 in WRC2 while Fabio Andolfi completed the podium in the class. Jean-Baptiste Franceschi secured the JWRC win ahead of Terry Folb.
Round five of the 2018 FIA World Rally Championship, Rally Argentina, takes place between April 26-29.
