Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT announced that the team retired Elfyn Evans's and Scott Martin's car at the end of Stage 16 without giving a clear explaination behind this decision.
Evans and Martin were second overall at the end of Stage 11, but they lost three places at the end of Stage 12 as they had a half spin and afterwards the driveshaft of their car was damaged. They completed the Saturday morning in eighth place as they dropped more than four minutes on the first pass from "Ouninpohja" stage which was also the longest stage of Rally Finland and the final stage of the morning. The pair were able to return their car back to the service park, but they received a 160-seconds time penalty as they left 16 minutes late from the service area. According to DirtFish, Tom Fowler stated that the mechanics changed some parts on the exhaust system apart from the damaged driveshaft and wanted more time to do that due to the high temperatures which are developing on the exhaust system. Moreover, Evans and Martin started behind some WRC2 crews on Saturday afternoon and eventually lost more positions as they completed their day outside the top ten. As a consequence of that, the Japanese team decided to retire their car at the end of Stage 16 since Evans and Martin did not score points from Saturday classification, but they will restart tomorrow under the SuperRally regulations. Last but not least, it must be mentioned that Jari-Matti Latvala stated that Toyota was thinking of giving team orders to Sami Pajari on Saturday afternoon in order to help Evans on his championship fight with Thierry Neuville, but it was not necessary since Evans dropped even more behing on the classification.
Photo Credits: Toyota
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