Thierry Neuville left FIA World Rally Championship leader Kalle Rovanperä struggling to keep up by setting the tempo through Rally Estonia’s opening morning in his Hyundai i20 N Rally1 Hybrid.

Belgian driver Neuville, who was 1.0s off the lead in fourth after Thursday night’s curtain-raising superspecial stage in Tartu, blasted to the head of the pack through Friday’s opening 24.45-kilometre Peipsiääre test, the longest of the rally.

On a morning when M-Sport Ford Puma Rally1 Hybrid-powered home hero Ott Tänak – hampered by a five-minute penalty for an engine change – topped the timesheets in all three stages, Neuville outshone the rest of the pack. He reached the mid-leg service with a 6.8s advantage over Rovanperä while Elfyn Evans was a further 6.2s back in third.

Neuville, currently fifth in the championship, is on a comeback mission after he was disqualified from last month’s Safari Rally.

“We are having fun and the car feels not so bad,” he said. “When the surface is hard, the grip is really low and I struggled a bit with that. [In the last stage] I was losing the rear all of the time, I had a couple of wide slides, but I had fun.”

Championship leader and road opener Rovanperä complained of a lack of traction caused by loose stones on the mainly dry road surface. The Finn, who pilots a Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 Hybrid, hunts down his third consecutive Rally Estonia triumph this weekend.

Evans, driving an identical car, felt he was missing “that last bit of speed” over the lightning-fast gravel roads. Just 1.3s separated him from fourth-placed Esapekka Lappi, who completed the morning with no hybrid boost after a heavy landing in Peipsiääre.    

Early prospects look good for Lappi’s team-mate Teemu Suninen, stepping up to a Rally1-specification Hyundai for the first time. Trailing his fellow Finn by only 5.3s, Suninen was visibly shaken after some stages as he got acclimatised with the sheer speed of the car.

Takamoto Katsuta has vowed to take a “step by step” approach to his sixth Rally Estonia but his confidence took a knock in Mustvee 1 when he overshot a junction. The Toyota hopeful completed the loop 10.1sec behind Suninen and had a mere eight-tenths of a second in hand over M-Sport Ford’s Pierre-Louis Loubet.

Oliver Solberg set a storming pace to build an early lead over Škoda Fabia RS Rally2 rival Andreas Mikkelsen in the FIA WRC2 category. The Toksport WRT pair hold eighth and ninth overall while Gus Greensmith, who is not scoring championship points, completes the top 10.

Estonia’s Georg Linnamäe is ahead in WRC Challenger after SS4, William Creighton leads the FIA Junior WRC Championship runners with Benjamin Korhola on top in FIA WRC3.