M-Sport Ford World Rally Team’s Gus Greensmith and Elliott Edmondson continued their impressive performance at Rallye Monte-Carlo today. Contesting the event for the first time with four-wheel-drive machinery, the British pairing won three out of four stages in the RC2 class – maintaining a strong lead in the WRC 2 Pro category whilst also increasing their RC2 lead to over a minute and a half.
Gus Greensmith (1st WRC 2 Pro and RC2) said:
“Three out of four stage wins, so I would call that a good day. I’ve had this calm, quiet confidence with the car today I’ve never had before; and I’ve felt as though I can control the pace exactly as I want to.
“I took the first two stages quite easy as I knew that they were tricky, but I was still able to open the lead from six to twenty seconds. We had a bit of a blip in the first stage of the afternoon [SS11] where I lost five seconds, but we were back on it for the last one [SS12].
“After Bonato made a mistake the lead went up to over a minute and a half so we’ve given ourselves a nice buffer for tomorrow. We don’t need to do anything silly. We can be conservative with the tyre choices and bring it home for the win.”
Team Principal, Richard Millener, said:
“Gus and Elliott have been really impressive this weekend and now hold a strong lead in the RC2 class as well as the WRC 2 Pro class. They have the speed but they also have the maturity and it looks as though it’s all coming very naturally to them at the moment.
"This is one of the most difficult events on the calendar, but they’ve faced every challenge head on and are now only four stages away from coming out on top on their four-wheel-drive Monte debut.”
