Quotes:
Jari-Matti Latvala (Team Principal)
“There was again a lot of drama already on Friday here at Rally Japan, like there has been every year. It was a very disappointing start for us this morning in the first stage with the time lost for Taka and Seb, but we didn’t give up the fight and things continued to change rapidly, with issues for our rivals that opened the door for us once more in the championship battle. At the end of the day our positions are not so bad, with Elfyn in second and both Taka and Seb very close to third place, and if we can get two cars in the top three at the end of Saturday, it could be still an exciting Sunday coming up. But firstly we need to get through tomorrow well, as the conditions could be very tricky again.”

Elfyn Evans (Driver car 33)
“It was a demanding start this morning with a lot of grip changes. Some of them were difficult to read so we had a few slides here and there like probably everybody had. I think the tyre choice for the morning was pretty good – we took the benefit of our extra hard tyres later on – but it wasn’t such a straightforward choice for the afternoon. This time the grip was probably better than we expected and so our tyre choice maybe wasn’t perfect, but things did get better through the loop and we finished it positively. It’s all still open for tomorrow. As a team we’re all still in the game and we’ll keep doing our best right until the end.”

Sébastien Ogier (Driver car 17)
“This first stage of the day here in Japan is always a very challenging one and not my luckiest one. For the second time in three years we picked up a puncture in a similar section of the stage. I couldn’t really feel where it happened, so it was very disappointing and hard to take, but that’s the way it goes. We tried from the next stage to keep the focus, which is not easy in this situation, and at least we could recover some positions already. At the moment it’s not enough and we still need to get some more places for the team, but there are many stages still to go, anything can happen, and we keep fighting.”

Takamoto Katsuta (Driver car 18)
“This morning we did not have the start that we planned in the first stage, where we unfortunately had a tyre off the rim. That was very unfortunate and disappointing but luckily we didn’t lose too much time and could still come back to fourth overall at the end of the day, which is not so bad considering how it started this morning. I had to change my approach and drive a bit more on the safe side to gain positions when others had problems, but it worked out OK. There’s still a long way to go and many things have already happened, so we don’t give up. I just need to keep focused on doing my own job for the team and on my own driving.”

End of day two (Friday):
1 Ott Tänak/Martin Järveoja (Hyundai i20 N Rally1 HYBRID) 1h26m17.6s
2 Elfyn Evans/Scott Martin (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1 HYBRID) +20.9s
3 Adrien Fourmaux/Alexandre Coria (Ford Puma Rally1 HYBRID) +1m53.9s
4 Takamoto Katsuta/Aaron Johnston (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1 HYBRID) +1m54.0s
5 Sébastien Ogier/Vincent Landais (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1 HYBRID) +2m15.6s
6 Grégoire Munster/Louis Louka (Ford Puma Rally1 HYBRID) +2m37.4s
7 Nikolay Gryazin/Konstantin Aleksandrov (Citroën C3 Rally2) +3m43.6s
8 Sami Pajari/Enni Mälkönen (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +4m57.1s
9 Josh McErlean/James Fulton (Škoda Fabia RS Rally2) +5m55.7s
10 Hiroki Arai/Shunsuke Matsuo (Škoda Fabia R5) +5m57.4s
(Results as of 19:15 on Friday, for the latest results please visit www.wrc.com)

What's next?
Saturday is focused on a trio of stages to the north-east – including the new Mount Kasagi test – run twice either side of a tyre-fitting zone at Nakatsugawa Park. The Toyota Stadium super special completes the day after evening service.