Neuville delivers title warning
Hyundai’s mercurial star was on top form in Sweden and charged into the WRC points lead
For around a second, just a second, nobody breathed. During that same second Nicolas Gilsoul glanced upwards, rather than to his left, to focus on Thierry Neuville, who was briefly regarding him from a similarly unfamiliar angle. Touchdown. Another second, another note. Onwards.
And for a Hyundai team transfixed by the spectacle on television, a long, loud exhale. When the i20 Coupe WRC arrived at the end of the second run through the Vargasen stage last Saturday afternoon, there was spontaneous applause from the mechanics. Team principal Michel Nandan emerged from the command centre in search of a cup of coffee. A drop of something stronger wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Heavy snow had altered the line through the famous Colin’s Crest jump section of the stage, requiring drivers to keep as far to the left on takeoff as possible. The #5 i20 did that, but then – mid-flight – scuffed the top of the head-height snowbank at 100mph, tipping an extraordinary angle.
Was it a moment, Michel? “Yes.
It was a moment.” Was it a moment, Thierry? “No,” he said, deadpan. “I was careful here. The stage had gone well until then and I didn’t want to take a risk. I only jumped 32 metres or something…”
That was Neuville’s state of mind last week. Always full of confidence, Neuville delivered a ruthless drive through horrible conditions. Comfortable in the car, he took his Hyundai to places where others feared to tread, and he did it quicker than anybody else.
That confidence has often seemed misplaced. Twelve months ago he offered further evidence for the case that his genius is flawed when he wrecked his car’s left-front suspension against a barrier, needlessly trying to tighten a superspecial corner in Karlstad. Had that played on his mind this time around? “No,” he asserted. “That was last year. I look only forward.”
But he might have permitted himself a glance in the rear-view mirror, for when he arrived back in service unscathed late on Saturday night, he grinned: “I took my revenge on this place.”
Neuville led the event from the third stage forwards. The closest he came to being headed after that was when Citroen’s Craig Breen whittled his advantage down to 4.2 seconds after the first run through Hagfors.
Breen’s decision to run with only one spare wheel for the afternoon was, technically, where the event was decided. The Irishman knew he absolutely had to make his 20kg weight-saving count on the first stage of the afternoon – thereafter he would be on the back foot as Neuville made the most of the sharper studs on offer from two spares.
Breen was quickest in Torntorp, but only by 1.3s. It wasn’t enough. From then on, Neuville edged and eased away. Fastest on the afternoon’s remaining two stages, the leader felt his confidence swell. He backed himself.
This sort of result had been coming since the start of last year. From the moment Neuville set foot in Hyundai’s 2017 offering, his ascendency began. Arguably, he would have had the title last year had it not been for impatience and a determination to show the rest of the world he could round each and every corner quicker than they could.
Last weekend he got all that under control and drove one of the best rallies of his career. Through Friday and Saturday, his rivals squirmed as their cars hopped in and out of the ruts, darting and diving in every direction. Neuville danced his car through and around those obstacles in some style. The grip and stability at the rear of the i20 were exceptional. And marked by comparison with the set-up of his team-mate Andreas Mikkelsen.
Mikkelsen and Hayden Paddon had joined Neuville on a provisional Friday night podium, but the other two Hyundais fell back. Mikkelsen chased too much time, running his car too hard for Saturday’s faster stages, and finished third. Paddon’s first outing of
“I was careful. I didn’t want to take a risk. I only jumped 32 metres or something…”
the season was shaping up nicely – despite his continued inability to find the same pace on his first run at stages as he was doing in the afternoon. Paddon lost fourth to a charging Esapekka Lappi on the final stage.
Early on, Neuville and Mikkelsen had run one-two. “It’s a bit like Tom and Jerry,” joked Norwegian Mikkelsen. The first run through Hagfors was a certainly a comedy of slapstick errors for the pair as they both spun at the same corner. That was the beginning of the end of Mikkelsen’s challenge for the lead. For Neuville it was nothing more than a blip.
“When I spun, I saw some components in the road,” said the Belgian. “The snowbank was quite destroyed there. I knew it was him…”
Ultimately, then, Breen was the closest challenger – a shade under 20s behind Neuville at the finish – but the result, in all honesty, hadn’t been in much doubt. When Scott Martin, Breen’s co-driver, suggested at the post-event press conference that he and his man had put the leader under pressure when they were just 4.2s down, Neuville just gave a wry smile.
“What pressure?” he said. “It must have went the other way. I didn’t see it.” It was a joke. But he meant it.
“The confidence was high in the car,” said Neuville, “and I always felt like I had another gear if I needed it.”
Brilliant Breen
Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday lunch. Same question, same answer. Tell us, Citroen team principal Pierre Budar, what do you think of Breen’s work? One word: “brilliant”. He got that right.
Now, there will be plenty out there who will point to him being ninth in the running order on an opening day that kicked off with heavy snow still falling. Undoubtedly he benefited from a cleaner road, but he’d earned it by running first through far worse between Agnieres-en-devoluy and Corps on the Monte last month.
From the first stage in Sweden, things started to look good for Breen. “There was a fast left-hander near the start of the stage,” he said, “when we went into it I thought, ‘Oh…’ We were a bit hot in there and I was waiting to run wide. But the car stuck. After that I pushed a bit more and it kept on coming.”
If the morning had been bad for the boys at the front, the afternoon was reckoned to be even worse. The national and historic cars had been through between the first and second loop of the WRC field. Narrower cars on narrower tyres wrought havoc with the surface.
This would be a good opportunity to introduce five-time world champion Sebastien Ogier into this tale. Remember him? Winner and hero of the Alps for a fifth consecutive January last month, he was nowhere in Sweden. He made one mistake and dropped some time in a snowbank on Friday, but otherwise he was simply sacrificed at the front of the field. He managed just one top-three stage time before making a tactical time loss, his M-sport Ford shipping four minutes in penalties for a better place on the road ahead of the power stage.
“The ruts,” said Ogier, “are 20cm narrower than my car. Even in a straight line I have to fight like hell to stay on the road. The feeling is horrible – in every corner there is no way I can load the car and I hit virtually every snowbank. I just put my front wheels in [the ruts] like everybody else, but the rear is in 10 or 15 centimetres of loose. Car after car after car you see the times are getting faster and faster and faster. It’s a joke.”
In Ogier’s wake, the line progressively widened and the grip improved. Ninth in on Friday, Breen rattled the C3 through the second run at Svullrya and Rojden on the Norwegian side of the border faster than anybody. The violence of the lateral movement in the car was astonishing, and the only answer was to bury the throttle, let the car pull itself through, and hang on.
“It’s bloody tricky, but we’re in there and I’m giving it everything,” said Breen. “You get it in those ruts and it’s like Cool Runnings…”
Breen could certainly feel the rhythm. The confidence continued to build as he hauled more and more time out of his team-mates Kris Meeke and Mads Ostberg. Fourth on the road on Friday, Meeke struggled to find form, favour or fortune in Sweden and paid the highest price of anybody when he nerfed a snowbank. Not only did he drop a handful of seconds, his Citroen had swallowed snow, which found its way into the turbo and cut the power.
Ostberg was a sensational second quickest at shakedown, but struggled to carry that pace forward into the event. He did, however, deliver a very much appreciated sixth place to keep Citroen’s manufacturer tally ticking over.
More importantly, Citroen has turned a page from the shocking inconsistency of Sweden last year, when the C3 looked like it had a mind of its own on more than one occasion.
Work on the suspension, rollbars and the torque split has wrought a major upturn in pace on gravel, and there was huge relief when Breen showed this to be the case in the snow.
Technicial director Christophe Besse is a man who knows all about the advances for the car, but he was more than happy to hand credit to Craig on this one.
“He was not happy with the car in shakedown, and in the test he was a bit lost without the direction,” he said.
“But then when we come to the event he got the confidence and he is very strong. He didn’t complain about the car, and the car wasn’t perfect – I don’t think anybody had the perfect car here. What was important was that he didn’t chase the car, he didn’t change a lot, he took the confidence and a lot of this result came from him and his confidence. He did his job.”
Those feelings were echoed from within the car, where Scott Martin reported a perfect performance from the man on his left.
“No spins, no nothing,” he said. “Everything just came to him and we were able to just get quicker and quicker. You could feel the confidence rising in the car – it’s so important to get back to this place and now we need to kick on.”
By the finish, Breen, typically struggling to keep his emotions in check, was delighted. “In Finland a couple of years ago we were third,” he said. “But we were a bit of a way away. This time we’re here in second, but we’ve been at them for the whole event. We really turned a corner this time.”
Unfortunately, that corner has led them into a two-month holding pattern as Breen and Martin step down for Sebastien Loeb to drive their car in Mexico and Corsica.
What happened to Toyota?
Last year, Toyota silenced the service park with an incredible maiden Rally Sweden win for the Yaris WRC. Last month, Tommi Makinen warned Ogier and the best of the rest about what they could expect when they stepped into his back yard on round two. Fourth, seventh and ninth probably wasn’t what Makinen had in mind.
With Ott Tanak and Jari-matti Latvala running second and third on the road, the running order did for them on Friday, but the speed from the Estonian and Toyota’s second Finn Lappi in more consistent conditions was extraordinary.
Tanak led after the first two stages before slipping down the order and into a Hagfors snowbank after whacking Meeke while trying to pass the ailing Citroen. At that point he knew this wasn’t going to be his rally.
Despite that, his stock continues to rise within the team – as does that of Lappi, for whom second became seventh when he got sucked into a Svullrya snowbank. Such misdemeanours are tolerated on your first visit to the event in a World Rally Car (and only your second ever appearance here). That tolerance was extended when Lappi leapfrogged from sixth to fourth in a sublime final-day charge that ended with maximum power stage points.
The bigger question for the team is how Latvala deals with the speed his team-mates are finding. To begin with it was quite endearing as Latvala, after seeing his times, pondered whether Tanak had come from another planet.
Latvala dropped time with a transmission problem on Saturday afternoon, but he needs to look forwards – he’s not going to find the answer to this question with his head in his hands.
There would have been similar cause for reflective introspection at M-sport. For the first time in 13 rallies there wasn’t a Ford Fiesta WRC on the podium. Ogier’s misery has already been documented, and an early puncture spiked Elfyn Evans’s guns (just like on the Monte). Teemu Suninen showed some promise when the going was good for him on Friday, but his lack of experience of both car and conditions told as the weekend advanced.
Hyundai went from bottom to top in the manufacturer standings last weekend, with M-sport doing the exact opposite. There’s no doubt this was a conditions thing and nothing fires that team up like losing. Ogier left a Sweden’s WRC winter wonderland in a dark mood on Sunday. As well he might, since he’s 10 points down on the new championship leader.
Neuville walked on water last weekend. If he emerges in a similar position from running first on the road in Mexico, he’ll look like a man capable of doing the same when that water isn’t frozen.