Second straight retirement a "hard pill to swallow", says Paddon

The 29-year-old suffered his second DNF in a row after his victory in Rally Argentina, as he had also since crashed out in Portugal.

"It’s a very hard pill to swallow to have two rallies in a row end like this from very silly mistakes," said Paddon.

"Okay, I’m sure we’ll come back stronger and we’ll sit down and go through things substantially to learn from this and to be stronger in the future, but this is not what I expect of myself and we need to be better."

The Kiwi driver, hindered by a spin earlier, was seventh overall before SS7 and his day ended prematurely after he ran off-road, rolling and damaging the left rear of his car.

"Obviously it’s very disappointing to end the rally in this fashion," said Paddon, whose car couldn't be fixed for Saturday.

"We were just trying to have a clean afternoon after the problems we were having in the morning. We were going at a good speed, but just got caught out by doing too wide on the tarmac for the last left-hand corner of stage seven.

"We got sucked into the gravel and couldn’t turn the car in and then we were a passenger from there."

Rally Italia became Paddon's third non-scoring event in six rallies as he only finished 25th in Monte-Carlo.

His teammates Thierry Neuville and Dani Sordo currently sit first and sixth in the order respectively halfway through the rally.