ELFYN Evans remains unmoved by the growing attention around the World Rally Championship title race, insisting it is still “early days” despite a frustrating outing at EKO Acropolis Rally Greece.

The Toyota Gazoo Racing driver arrived in Greece with a 20-point lead over team-mate Takamoto Katsuta, fully aware that the punishing gravel roads would present one of the toughest challenges of the season for the championship leader.

Opening the road on Friday placed Evans at an immediate disadvantage, with five of the day’s six stages run only once. Yet the Welshman handled the task impressively, limiting the damage and keeping himself in contention.

By Saturday afternoon, he had worked his way from seventh to fifth overall, only for a puncture on stage 13 to undo much of that progress. A second tyre problem on Sunday compounded the frustration, dropping him further down the order and threatening a significant blow to his title hopes.

Evans initially finished seventh, with his championship advantage reduced to seven points. However, post-rally one-minute penalties handed to Hyundai’s Adrien Fourmaux and M-Sport Ford driver Josh McErlean promoted him to fifth place.

The revised result proved particularly valuable. Evans gained four extra championship points – notably the same margin by which he lost last year's title battle to Sébastien Ogier.

Instead of seeing his lead slashed dramatically, Evans now heads to the next round in Estonia with an 11-point advantage over Katsuta. Ogier, meanwhile, remains a growing threat after collecting the maximum 35 points in Greece to move within 37 points of the championship lead.

Evans told the WRC website: “It [leading the championship] doesn’t mean a lot and of course it has been a bad weekend in terms of points, but it is early days still.

“It doesn’t mean too much at the moment. We have just got to go to Estonia and do what we can there.

“I didn’t have a lot of expectations coming in and it was a little bit frustrating, of course, as things were starting to look okay by Saturday afternoon. But that puncture did a lot of damage to where we were overall. On Sunday, I did the damage [by hitting a bank and knocking a tyre off the rim]. It was a bit like that.”

Having spent much of the past two seasons facing the challenges that come with leading the championship and opening the road on gravel events, Evans believes Greece was difficult to use as a benchmark for measuring progress.

“After Portugal it was quite clear, it [my road opening] was better [than last year],” he added. “Here in Greece, it was so extreme on Friday, so it was a really difficult one to judge.

“There were some stages where we did as much as we could and there were some stages where I felt we could have done more. When you are first on the road, you almost have to be perfect if you want to be in with a shot. You only have to have a bit of bad rhythm on top of the extreme road cleaning and then it is completely finished.”

The championship now moves to Rally Estonia from July 17-19, where Evans expects a very different challenge on the fast gravel roads.

“We will have a completely different mentality when we go to Estonia,” he added.