The fifth round of the FIA World Rally Championship got underway last night under the shadow of the medieval castle at Guimarães before crews headed to the rallycross circuit at Lousada for a short stage en route back to Matosinhos and the overnight halt. This morning, however, the route took the crews north towards the Spanish border for two identical loops of three stages before returning to Porto for two runs around the all-new street stage in the city. Meeke was on top form from the outset and with fastest times in the opening two stages he progressively extended his advantage over Ogier, who won last night’s rally opener. This afternoon the Citroën driver won all three repeated stages to pull out a dominant lead after nearly 150 kilometres of competition. Like Meeke, Ogier has run without problems, although the Frenchman struggled with some oversteer this morning. Sordo started cautiously, preserving tyres in the opening loop, but this afternoon a puncture in the last of the long stages saw him drop 16.4 seconds. He is however still on Ogier’s heels, just 5.4 seconds adrift of the World Champion.

Ott Tanak made a fine start to the day, catapulting himself from eighth last night to fourth by the mid-day service, benefitting from new specification DMACK tyres. However this afternoon the Estonian went off the road and rolled. Despite a brief fire the crew escaped unscathed, extinguishing the car before too much more damage was caused. Their accident happened just minutes after Hayden Paddon suffered exactly the same fate at the same location, although the Kiwi’s car burned out within minutes leaving the uninjured crew with nothing more than what they were standing in. Neither crew will be able to re-start under Rally 2 regulations.

As a consequence of Tanak’s accident, Andreas Mikkelsen moved into fourth and Thierry Neuville climbed to fifth. The Belgian got off to a slow start this morning but his confidence increased throughout the day, and while he picked up a flat tyre in the final long stage, he set fastest time in the two runs around the Porto Street Stage. Young Frenchman Stephane Lefebvre is having a great rally and overnights in sixth ahead of M-Sport’s Mads Østberg. The Norwegian had problems with the gearshift this morning and counted himself lucky not to go off in the same place as Paddon and Tanak. He had a better run over the repeated stages but is seventh overnight, nearly two minutes off the lead. Team-mate Eric Camilli is just 3.7 seconds behind but well ahead of Jari-Matti Latvala, the Finn enduring a difficult day. He was way too cautious this morning unable to get a good feeling with the car, but just as he started to bounce back he broke the power steering and was forced to run the afternoon stages without repairs.

Pontus Tidemand rounds off the top 10 but more importantly the Swede tops the FIA WRC 2 Championship category in his Skoda Fabia R5. He heads Nicolas Fuchs by 35.5 seconds. In the FIA Junior WRC Championship Simone Tempestini is ahead of Martin Koci, both drivers in identical specification DS3 R3s.

Rally de Portugal – Unofficial Classification after Section 3