The Kiwis always knew the sixth championship event would be challenging given the bumpy tarmac stages with unpredictable grip, which were made even harder because of the rain.
After being the 10th fastest on Friday’s late run of the popular Zlin superspecial stage, Paddon then came through Saturday’s four stages in seventh overall and 13sec off championship rival Mathieu Franceschi.
"We always knew it was going to be tough as the Czech Rally is one of the most challenging on the ERC calendar," Paddon said.
"We focused on trying to have a clean rally and make no mistakes, thinking about our own game."
Things went relatively smoothly until the rain on Saturday afternoon, and when they changed to a couple of rain tyres, they had two punctures at the same time.
"We stopped to change the first puncture but later in the stage had another puncture, which we had to drive out on.
"That cost us the best part of four minutes and dropped us down to 18th in the standings and out of the points."
Throughout Sunday’s six tarmac tests, the pair fought their way back up the leaderboard, improving a position stage by stage until they held 13th place by the rally’s end to get back into a points-earning position.
The third-fastest time on the bonus points-earning power stage netted them a very welcome three extra points.
Paddon now has 95 points to Franceschi’s 82 with two rounds to go.
"Sunday was all about damage limitation ... as we tried to get back into the points for the top 15 finishers. We were able to do that, which was great", he said.
"We also pushed as hard as we could on the power stage to get some bonus points, which we were also able to do — third place on the power stage was a good result to come away with.
"Considering Franceschi’s retirement, which is obviously very unfortunate for him and not what we want to see for any of our competitors, but it puts us in the position where we were able to salvage some points from the weekend and take the positive of extending our championship lead."
Paddon now heads to the Rali Ceredigion in Wales from August 30 to September 1.
Paddon has competed at the event once before, but with a different car, team and co-driver.
