The World Rally Championship’s inaugural visit to Latvia is poised to be the most challenging of the season to date for points leader Thierry Neuville.
The Hyundai driver heads to Latvia’s high-speed gravel stages with a 15-point lead over Toyota’s Elfyn Evans, but believes he’ll have a battle on his hands to maintain his advantage due to several factors.
The Baltic nation’s 20 stages are largely unknown by everyone, creating a level playing field, although Neuville will have the disadvantage of being the first to tackle them, virtue of his road position.
While the Belgian has carried this burden since the opening round of the championship, he feels this weekend it will have the most significant effect. Unlike other rallies where loops of stages are repeated, providing cleaner conditions for the second pass, five of Friday’s eight stages will be only run once.
Coupled with the absence of a midday service to make changes to his i20 N and a lack of testing before the event, this has left Neuville to fear the worst.
“I mean it could be the most challenging if you consider that we have never been here and we discover the surface of the roads, and the fact we have had no real testing for that event,” Neuville told Motorsport.com.
“There are mainly first-pass stages on Friday, there’s lots of cleaning and additionally to that again there is no midday service. So, if you go with the wrong set-up now you basically stick with it for the whole day, so this makes it really challenging.”
Thierry Neuville, Martijn Wydaeghe, Hyundai World Rally Team Hyundai i20 N Rally1
Photo by: McKlein / Motorsport Images
Neuville has already found the limits during Thursday morning’s shakedown, when he was fortunate to survive a wild venture into a ditch.
“Obviously, it is really slippery. We went out there to see where the limits are, and I think I found them,” he smiled.
The shakedown highlighted another concern for crews in the form of the wooden pole serving as anti-cut devices, placed on certain corners. Some of those had been removed while drivers felt organisers had deployed too many and positioned them too close to the edge of the road.
“Obviously, it’s disturbing, for sure. I mean, sometimes there are three or four in one corner,” Neuville added.
“If the first two are missing, you are tempted to go into the corner, and suddenly you end up in the corner with two poles in the middle of the…
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