Rallye WRC Monte Carlo 2019

[mknight]

Can somebody who understands these things calculate where Tanak and Meeke would be if they had lost no time to punctures?

[I appreciate that maybe they had (some of) the punctures because they were cutting harder than the other drivers, and to avoid them they would have to go slower. But it would be interesting to know the times.]

Obviously it's highly hypotetical. On one hand you can say that they (mostly Meeke) were just "cruising" after the punctures and didn't need to risk. On the other hand it gave them road position advantage on Saturday morning and they had no pressure on them (which especially for Meeke is imo rather important).

The time lost relative to the stage winner:
Tanak: 2:22
Meeke: 1:01+3:51+0:49=5:32

This would give Tanak winning by 7 secs and Meeke 6s behind Ogier on 3rd. Anyway this is extremely idealized cause they probably wouldn't have matched/won the stages as Toyotas weren't really dominant on Friday with times mostly around 3-5 even on same tires and for Meeke on Thursday Neuville had better tires on that SS.

A little bit more realistic time losses:

Using Ogiers time from first pass as a measure for Tanak since I believe they had same tires on both passes Tanak would loose 2:07:
In total time that places Tanak 8s behind Ogier on 3rd place - so definitely fighting for win, but not clearly first, that can be also said about the idealized conclusion

for Meeke we can use Ogier and Tanak as reference (timeloss relative to Tanak and difference to Ogier on SS1 used for SS2, timeloss to Ogier on SS4 used for SS7 and time gain relative to Tanak and Ogier on SS5 used for SS8 time), giving time losses of: 0:43 + 3:28 +0:46 => 4:57
This gives 30s behind Ogier - so maybe not really in the top 3 fight (Ogier, Neuville, Tanak), but safely 4th

Note that this is fast calculation without doublechecking so there surely are some errors for Meeke's calculation, but it gives an indication.