Evans and his team-mates Kalle Rovanpera and Takamoto Katsuta all opted to take only soft tyres for the loop held on roads that were much more abrasive than those navigated on Friday.
While Evans briefly managed to overhaul Hyundai’s Teemu Suninen to claim second overall and Rovanpera climbed to fourth after winning stage seven, their tyre strategy backfired on stage nine.
Towards the end of the morning’s final test, the longest of the rally at 28,72km, all three Toyotas hit trouble as their tyres began to delaminate and puncture.
Evans came the closet to pulling off the bold tyre choice before losing his rear tyres with 10 kilometres remaining, with his loss of 56.2s dropping the Welshman from second to fourth.
Now 1m16.8s behind leader Ott Tanak, he is just one place ahead of title rival Rovanpera, whom he needs to beat to maximise his world championship hopes. Rovanpera, who shipped 46.7s in the same stage, holds a 33-point advantage with this round and visits Central Europe and Japan remaining.
Reflecting on a rare bad tyre call, Evans said: “Clearly it was not the correct choice to begin with.
“In the last stage I felt like I was going really slowly to get to the end, but clearly not slow enough.
“It is difficult when you don’t have any splits in the car so you have to use your judgement. Maybe a much more conservative approach in the last one would have seen us lose a lot less time, but it is hard to call.
“[The tyre decision] is quite a mistake, that’s true. I think we just underestimated the rate of wear.
Source: Autosport