NEUVILLE LEAVES IT LATE
HYUNDAI’S LAST-GASP GLORY IN ITALY
This was sport at its absolute best. Two teams, two crews and two cars absolutely going at it. With 190.46 miles down and 4.32 to go, they were separated by 0.8 seconds. Ahead was one more stage, but that was Sunday in the sun. Let’s rewind to Friday and the rain.
The intensity of the stare was incredible. Barely blinking, Sebastien Ogier stared straight ahead, drinking in the detail of the road before him. Such was the focus on stage six, he almost missed his mouth with a spoonful of fruit salad.
The Frenchman is old school and very French when it comes to lunchtime. It’s for lunch. Not watching telly. But on Friday (and Saturday) a toe-to-toe battle with Thierry Neuville forced a rethink. It was time to get the laptop out.
Last week’s Rally Italy wasn’t just about who could win round seven of this year’s World Rally Championship. It went deeper than that. There’s needle between these two. Ogier’s ruled this world for the past five years and nobody wants the king’s crown more than Neuville. And there’s needle between these two teams in the tit-for-tat quarrel over penalties and appeals.
Of the two drivers, it’s usually Ogier who makes it more overtly personal. When asked if he wanted to talk about Neuville running at the front of the field in Sardinia, he said: “We saw when he was first on the road before, he was nowhere.”
Thierry let his times do the talking in Portugal last month and then prayed for rain ahead of the flight out to the Mediterranean island of Sardinia for Rally Italy. As the recce progressed, as the rally neared, the threats of rain grew stronger and stronger until Friday morning arrived and the downpours began. Right on cue.
“I have been doing a rain dance all week,” Neuville grinned, letting that line loose every time his rival was within range.
“He’s clearly better at dancing for the rain than I am,” said Ogier. “I have been doing this for a long time when I have been running at the front, but I have never been so lucky.”
As already outlined, last week’s Alghero-based event was about more than the potential 30 points on offer. It was the latest chapter in a thriller of a championship story, and one that is running under two working titles right now: ‘Six and counting’ or ‘The Belgian won’.
It’s no exaggeration to describe Rally Italy as potentially careerdefining for both. Ogier’s coming to the autumn of another season, wondering whether he has the motivation for another season-long campaign. Neuville’s drive and determination has never been higher as he nears the ultimate goal. But what was closer to the forefront of both minds was the next six weeks. Both knew a win would make for a far, far better summer holiday than the alternative.
The top two elevated themselves above and beyond the chasing pack by late afternoon Friday. Even in the rain, the cream, it seems, still rises.
The accepted thinking on gravel rallies is that when it rains being at the front of the field is the best place. Put simply, the moisture binds the stones together to offer better grip for the first cars through. Even when it stopped raining, the heat of the Sardinian summer sun baked a hard crust onto the surface, once again delivering more traction for the first Michelins through. Further back, the roads rutted and made muddy puddles.
Other than the top two, Andreas Mikkelsen deserves a mention for Friday morning. His time through SS2 was quite extraordinary. Running fifth on the road, he took 14.2s out of a problem-free Esapekka Lappi, the man directly ahead.
Finally, it looked like the Hyundai driver might be emerging from beneath the cloud – his i20 Coupe WRC was turning in and the rear was holding the line.
Neatness can be a trademark of the Norwegian when the ducks are in a row. They were neatly aligned first time through Tula. Same story through the ensuing Castelsardo test. The margin might have been smaller, but still he eased his way to a 15.5s lead over his nearest rival Neuville.
Another two stages and it was back to Alghero for lunch and a look at the clouds. Mikkelsen was 14s to the good from his team-mate, with Ogier fifth, 23s down and not best pleased.
But first stage out of service and Mikkelsen’s gearbox began to give him trouble, locking itself in reverse in the next test. He was out. Those black clouds also returned, but they didn’t sit solely over the number four i20. Instead they wrung themselves out over the top of Tula.
Ahead of the start, the drivers had identified Tula as the trickiest of the lot. The first part’s not too bad, but then up on top of the mountain among the windmills it becomes a real maze as you pick your way through. Trouble is, this section has been used so many times there’s a chance familiarity could breed contempt.
And then there’s the final downhill dash to the finish – extended a bit for this season. Seb Marshall described this as Corsica on gravel. It’s corner, corner, short straight, corner.
Except on Friday afternoon, it was Corsica on mud. And the fog had finished any chance of familiarity. Rather unkindly, the service park echoed to Welsh analogies...
The conditions were pretty awful, but Neuville flicked the wipers up a speed, selected stage mode and dived in. ‘Diving in’ was about right. Used to service the surrounding fields, tractors had rutted the Tula tracks and those ruts were now full of water. The Hyundai skipped and aquaplaned its way through, with its driver knowing full well he was handing something of an advantage to the man behind. In the three minutes between him and Ogier, the rain would gather again, but not to the same extent that he had experienced.
This gravel stage had provided a different kind of poisoned chalice for the championship leader.
Ogier was masterful. The first hint we were onto something special came at split two; six miles down and Ogier was four seconds up. A couple more miles and the margin was 15.5s to Neuville. By stage end, the Belgian was smashed to the tune of 17.5s.
First through, Neuville was away by the time Seb finished, so his reaction to the champ’s time was kept between himself and co-driver Nicolas Gilsoul. Next to the stop line and first to react to Ogier’s time, the look on Tanak’s face was a fair reflection of what had probably gone on inside the i20.
He was stunned. Nobody saw that coming. Not even Ogier. In the fog, the rain and the mist, trying to gauge your own speed is hard enough, let alone thinking about what your rivals could be doing.
“It’s the sort of stage where somebody could have told me I’d dropped 20 seconds and I would say: ‘Yes, maybe…’ It’s so hard to know where you are, the visibility was so tough,” said Ogier. “I tried so hard to drive clean, but the grip was changing all the time. I saw some of Thierry’s line going wide and going into the bank. I managed to be cleaner than him, no mistakes.
“I watched the on boards for this stage a little bit at lunchtime, Andreas showed this morning that it was possible to make a difference.”
It worked. In just under 14 miles Ogier had leap-frogged four cars to go from fifth and 23s down to a 3.5s lead.
The rest of the afternoon was classic Ogier. He built and built the advantage to come back to service in the evening 18.9s ahead.
Neuville, by his own admission, had gone backwards. Backwards to 2015. His approach to Monte Baranta was wild to the point of irresponsible.
Sliding wide on a fast right approaching a tighter left, the rear of the i20 disappeared into the bushes, reappearing without the rear wing. Unknowingly shorn of downforce, Thierry went harder still, flying spectacularly across a late-in-the-stage jump.
Coming to the finish slightly flustered he talked of fitting a new front-right and left-rear and the way that might have upset the balance.
An hour or so later and looking slightly bashful, he admitted to an alternative possibility. “That was the Thierry of three years ago,” he grinned, “maybe it was a bit wild in places. I had driven for three stages with the same tyres and then I had the great idea to cross my two new tyres for the last stage in the loop. It was difficult, the car was undriveable with the diffs spinning.”
With the sun coming to make for more consistent conditions through the weekend, it was difficult to see Ogier dropping this one. Neuville
nibbled 1.4s out of that lead first thing Saturday, but when Ogier hit back on
first of the morning’s two longer stages, the M-sport driver looked to have control. Then came Monte Lerno. Starting 600 metres down the road from finish of the previous test, the road’s similar in nature, so more of
same from Ogier could be expected. It was anything but. From the start, he was shipping
to Neuville. By the finish, Neuville had slashed into that lead, cutting it to 4.9s.
Ogier had no explanation. “Wrong rhythm… lost the rear a little bit…”
Right there, on the road north towards the town of Oschiri, Neuville flight. Momentum moved. If the half of the rally had been all about Ogier’s demon Tula 2 time, the second half was all Thierry.
Stalling on the line of a fairly meaningless superspecial cost Ogier another 2.3s. He fought back to win Coiluna, rebuilding the buffer to 6.8s. But that would be his last stage win of the rally.
Neuville had punctured the frontright, the tyre knocked off the rim a couple of miles before the finish. He was furious. And now he’d got no spare for the next two stages. Would he measure his approach? “No!”
Instead, he was sensational, a paragon of controlled aggression. The very antithesis of his panelbeating self 24 hours earlier.
One day, four stages and 3.9s was what stood between Neuville and a third win of the year. His Sunday morning words: “We can do this.” Ogier’s: “We’re going to push.” The prospect of a 19-point deficit mushrooming to 49 points if he made a mistake was certainly not far from the front of Ogier’s mind, but he simply struggled to get on the wave Neuville rode so beautifully through Sunday.
The complication of the number one Fiesta leaving the penultimate stop line without Julien Ingrassia’s timecard was indicative of the Ogier mindset. He looked and probably felt like a man under siege.
His door remained shut. He had nothing to say to the world after another Neuville stage win.
All this time, Thierry’s grin got wider and wider. He talked of making a couple of mistakes here and there, he couldn’t get the car into the ruts, sliding wide on the loose on top instead. Still he smiled.
Leading by 0.8s, Ogier offered a wave to the camera at the start of the powerstage. The impetus was, however, elsewhere.
Or was it? With 1.22 of the 4.32 miles done, Ogier’s advantage was 1.5s. Neuville had already stuck his car on two wheels at a left-hander on the descent towards the beach. Was that the beginnings of a sigh of relief coming out of M-sport?
Best not speak to early. And it would have been too early. Ogier dropped 0.9s in the next split, then halved the following one. With 990 metres to go, it was Ogier’s by six tenths.
Across the line, Neuville had turned that into the joint third-closest win in the history of the WRC: victory by seven-tenths.
Hyundai went bananas. Neuville appeared to standing-jump the roof of his i20, where he and Nicolas Gilsoul turned the moves they’d learned rain dancing a week earlier.
Back at the service park the team hadn’t stopped cheering, dancing and throwing each other in the air. Team principal Michel Nandan paused only to offer four words: “This is the best.” He then returned to delirium. It was that sort of result.
“We had to decide at the start of the last stage, what do we do?” said Neuville. “We didn’t have the best tyres, but we said we would go for it. We did. There was a small mistake when I came out of the ruts and the car went onto two wheels, but it was OK. This is incredible. What a fight.”
Unfortunately, due to Ogier’s timecard issue, some then decamped to the stewards’ room. But forget that, forget the politics, focus on the best battle since Argentina last year. Neuville won that one as well…