BEING BELGIAN DOESN’T MAKE ME THE YPRES FAVOURITE, NEUVILLE INSISTS
Thierry Neuville shouldn’t be considered the favourite for Ypres Rally glory, even though he’s started the event eight times and finished first last season.
Neuville was brought up in St Vith in southeast Belgium, some 180 miles from Ypres in the northwest, meaning he’s by no means a local. “You can have better knowledge of the conditions and the roads, but the rally is 300 kilometres from my home town so there’s no real advantage, Rallye Deutschland was more familiar to me because it was only 50 miles from home,” Neuville said. “But to have the support of the Belgian spectators is always great. In the past you had more pressure but now we know what we are capable of.
“It’s a tough event on very untypical roads compared to other Tarmac rallies we have in the WRC. There are lots of straight lines, tight junctions and very fast sections with huge cuts. The grip changes all the time and that makes it very challenging to judge the speed and the grip in the dry, which is even worse when it’s wet.
“The hardest thing is to judge the grip and to know how deep you can enter the cuts without making the car unstable, but using the benefit of the cut to carry more speed. If it’s wet the road can be dirty and you can have a lot of standing water.”
Neuville starts the second Ypres Rally to count for the World championship third in the standings, one point behind Ott Tanak, after he dropped a position to his Hyundai teammate after the Estonian won Rally Finland earlier this month.
“We’re finally heading to Tarmac again after a run of tricky gravel rallies,” Neuville said. “There is only one goal: to repeat our victory from last year.”