Who scored high in the voice of rally's eyes?
Photography by Hyundai, Toyota & M-Sport
Words by Colin Clark
Well I’ve just about cooled down from the tremendous heat in Greece for the Acropolis Rally!
This was yet another tough gravel event where we saw the best really shine. These are my driver ratings from Greece:
A faultless drive and a super impressive performance here in Greece that has Tänak fans everywhere daring to believe that this could well be his year.
Friday’s efforts with a car he knew was not to his liking set the foundation for what turned out to be a really quite dominant drive. Hyundai sorted his machinery overnight Friday and come Saturday, Tänak was simply untouchable.
This was no reckless, throw everything at it and damn the consequences effort – it was controlled, it was measured and it was disciplined.
Quite simply, in a weekend where others were quite literally reaching boiling point, he kept his cool and never once looked flustered or pressurised. No mistakes, and crucially a strategy that avoided punctures delivered one of the best drives of his career.
This was the kind of battling performance that delivered the driver’s title to Neuville last year.
Everything seemed to be going wrong, but all of a sudden there he was sitting in fifth place – with a decent haul of points a strong possibility. It worked for him last year because there were wins and podiums interspersed with his tenacious, battling salvage efforts.
This year it’s different though, and this performance quite simply wasn’t what Neuville needed. With Evans continuing to pick up good points and Tänak’s seemingly unstoppable momentum it’s quite possible that this result is the end of Thierry’s title defense.
He talked a lot about how the tires weren’t good enough, but there were a number of drivers who managed the tire preservation strategy with way more success than Neuville did.
He pace is still very much there but it’s just not happening for Neuville this season.
A wonderful return to podium form for Fourmaux was exactly what the battling young Fourmaux needed, and the team demanded.
The margins between brilliance, mediocrity and abject failure are slim at this level of the sport and Fourmaux has oscillated from one extreme to the other over the past few seasons. He’s remarkably quick, impressively brave, supremely talented and obsessively focused – but that’s not enough and Adrien, after his Sardinia disasters, realized that.
He looked and sounded like a different man here, and in part I guess that could be down to the psychological help he has recently sought and clearly benefitted from.
In a sport where all our top crews have remarkable pace, and with those fine margins I’ve talked about, could this be the difference that unlocks that final half a percent of performance that will ultimately deliver that desperately desired win? On the evidence of this performance, I think it could well be.
Once again showed the younger members of rallying’s elite just why he is right up there as one of the greatest of all time.
Second on the road on Friday, where five of the six stages were single pass and Ogier could justifiably have been expecting a tough time. Yet somehow he swept his way to a stage win and consistently competitive time that saw him just 16 seconds off the lead come Friday evening.
A slightly more cautious puncture mitigation strategy for Saturday’s tests saw him fall away from Tänak’s blistering pace at the front, but it did ensure that he was handily placed to take advantage of Fourmaux’s mistake and claim an improbable second place finish.
At the half way point of the season, Ogier sits a mere nine points off the championship lead having only contested five of the seven rounds. Yes he’s missing Estonia, but you’d be naive to believe that he is no longer a title challenger. He’s still quite clearly capable of winning any rally he chooses to enter.
Another solid performance from our championship leader once again delivered a good haul of points.
Evans knew right from the get go that his best chance of a good finish here was not to throw caution to the wind and drive fast, but to stay out of trouble and gain positions as others faltered. And he executed that strategy perfectly.
It must, at times, be incredibly frustrating for Elfyn. He’s come into these past three punishing gravel rallies in the best form of his life and hasn’t been able to challenge in any of them. But that was never going to be possible and Evans has shown remarkable discipline and patience to stick to the task in hand and continue this impressive consistent points gathering mission that will be crucial to his championship challenge.
By Kalle’s standards, this was another below average performance. Rovanperä struggled to find any real pace and compounded his woes by making a mistake and going off early on Saturday afternoon.
There’s a whole lot of head scratching going on in the Toyota camp right now because there is no question that that greatest talent we have seen in generations is going through a challenging period.
At the end of the event Rovanperä said he was tired.
For a young man who very much lives and loves life to the full, who has enjoyed nothing but the most remarkable of success in his meteoric rise to the very top, this was possibly the most worrying thing I’ve heard from him all season.
It was all going really quite well for Taka-san, until it wasn’t.
Takamoto’s number one objective for this season had to be to cut out the silly, small but costly mistakes that have blighted his efforts in recent years.
This one really was a very small mistake that he probably would have got away with on practically any other corner, but it cost him dearly here. However to Taka’s credit he offered up no excuses and took ownership of his mistake.
Looked really comfortable through Friday’s stages until that strange fuel tank issue stopped him in his tracks. I felt for the young Finn, because this looked potentially like a big step forward, balancing pace, patience and craft beautifully to put himself in with a real chance of a strong result.
Pajari will be frustrated at having missed out on a look at Saturday’s stages but will be encouraged by the fact that the trajectory is still very much moving in a forward and upwards direction.
This one required an enormously disciplined approach and that was exactly what Munster was delivering until he was cruelly stopped – again by that worrying fuel tank issue.
Munster and M-Sport adopted a risk mitigation strategy that was clearly a little frustrating at times for a driver who’s natural instincts were challenged by the need to drive more slowly than perhaps he was capable of.
A top five finish was very much on the cards and Munster deserves credit for his ability to strategize and execute a plan that was at times, I’m sure, counter intuitive.
A couple of small stutters in recent rallies has stalled Josh’s steady progress in his efforts to establish himself amongst the sport’s elite.
The mistake here was very similar to the one that ended his chances in Sardinia and that is something that he will have to closely analyze.
McErlean did however complete every stage and coped admirably with some niggling technical issues throughout the rally. Needs to kick star that forward momentum again in Estonia but steady progress has to be the target
Sesks is still looking to rediscover that flash of brilliance that announced his arrival on the fast gravel stages in Poland and Latvia last year.
No mistakes this time out is very much positive progress, and he showed some tenacity to set some decent stage times on an event that was completely new to him.
The levels of expectation around this young man are perhaps unrealistically high but that will only increase as we head back to the fast gravel events where he looked so impressive last season.
Words:Colin Clark
Tags: Acropolis Rally Greece, Acropolis Rally Greece 2025, Driver Ratings, WRC, WRC 2025
Publish Date June 30, 2025 DirtFish 
https://dirtfish-editorial.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/2025/06/5MqBZIxQ-2025ACROPOLIS_RT_092-780x520.jpg June 30, 2025
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