By Paul Evans

Elfyn Evans’ hopes of winning this weekend’s Rally Italia Sardegna look over, after the 29-year old was forced to stop and replace a broken steering arm in today’s opening stage.

Co-driven by Daniel Barritt, Evans had been a flying fourth after last night’s short stage around an old motocross track, but it all went wrong during this morning’s wet and muddy opening test. Luckily the M-Sport crew carry a spare steering arm in their Ford Fiesta WRC and Evans used all his engineering skills to replace the part in super quick time. He’s still very much in the rally and there is a long way to go until the finish on Sunday afternoon, but he completed SS2 having lost 13 minutes.

“We couldn’t get the car stopped for a right-hander,” said Evans. “I just got it sideways and touched the bank, which broke the steering arm. We had one in the car and got it fixed, but lost a lot of time.

“It’s always hard to push to the maximum when you’ve lost so much time. We need to get the car back to service and checked over, and then see what we can salvage from the weekend.”