Kris Meeke Corsica WRC crash caused by pacenote error

Meeke's hopes of victory on the French island were spoiled by an opening day puncture. He bounced back with an rapid time on the first Saturday stage, 17 seconds faster than anybody over the 32 miles.

Unfortunately for Meeke and co-driver Paul Nagle a mistake made on the recce ruled them out on the first corner of the next stage.

Meeke, who arrived on Corsica on the back of two consecutive WRC wins in Portugal and Finland, was aiming to become the first Brit since Colin McRae in 2001 to complete a consecutive hat-trick of WRC wins.

He said: "On the first run of the recce I wrote the note: 'Long left three, tightens to minus,' but then on the second pass of he recce, I decided to take out the 'tightens to minus'.

"I shouldn't have done that. I was on the gas when I should have been on the brakes.

"Tightens to minus would have had us slowing the car in the middle of the corner."

"We had some lock on and the impact knocked the whee. I drove on around the corner and pulled up, we couldn't go any further."

Meeke was frustrated with his mistake on the recce, but was upbeat about the performance of the last two days - and admitted he was surprised about his scorching pace in SS5.

"When you come to the rally of 10,000 corners, you need 10,000 pacenotes to be right," he said.

"When we came to the end of the first stage this morning, I said to Paul I'd be happy if we're within 20 [seconds] of the fastest time.

"It really didn't feel anything special. I was really surprised when I saw the time.

"The car won't need a lot of work, so hopefully we should be fine [to rejoin] tomorrow, it'd be nice to come back and maybe drive in some changeable conditions - you can always use that kind of experience on this event."