Neuville stuns Rally1 rivals to snatch Ypres Rally lead
Neuville powered his way to the top of the timesheets on the penultimate stage by turning a 4.3 second deficit into a 0.6 second lead. He managed to increase this to 2.5 seconds over his Hyundai team-mate Ott Tanak on the closing speed test with a fastest time – his fourth on the bounce.
“It’s been a whole different afternoon in terms of the handling with the car,” said Neuville. “I am much happier now. I feel like I have seen some areas where we can improve and get a bit more speed, but with this afternoon we can be very happy. Our weather team has done an amazing job with some very precise information and I have felt confident to trust their predictions. That’s very important on a day like this.”
The day began with Championship leader Kalle Rovanpera stamping his authority on proceedings. For once, running first on the road had its advantages due to the weather turning wet, and the level of dirt being dragged out onto the road through the art of corner cutting intensifying.
But it was not to last as, just one stage later, the Finn oversteered into a drainage ditch on a left-hander and crashed heavily off the road. The GR Yaris Rally1 car rolled four times before it came to rest, although Rovanpera and co-driver Jonne Halttunen managed to walk away with only their pride hurt and a run of ten consecutive points-scoring finishes in the World Rally Championship finally at an end.
Their exit immediately handed the mantle to Toyota team-mate Elfyn Evans and he battled hard on stages two, three and four to return to Ypres for the lunchtime service 2.3 seconds clear of Tanak. Evans looked at one with his car whereas Tanak, fresh from triumphing on Secto Rally Finland a fortnight ago, was having to wrestle with his. “I am not comfortable at all,” the Estonian complained. “I am actually quite struggling.” Yet in spite of that – and a puncture for the last few miles of the second test – he remained firmly in contention.
Last year’s Ypres Rally winner Thierry Neuville impressed on Thursday evening’s shakedown and was confident of being amongst the frontrunners on home soil but his best laid plans quickly unravelled around the 6.25-mile mark into SS1 – ‘Vleteren’. On “zero grip” he lost his braking and overshot a junction. But if anything, that helped to refocus his mind and even with constant set-up issues handicapping his I20 N Rally1 car, he found a way around these and elevated himself into the podium places, helped along by going fastest on stage two by 0.3 seconds.
Esapekka Lappi – on his first visit to the Tarmac classic in eight seasons – settled into fourth but admitted he was leaving precious seconds out on the stages. “I am being too slow and too safe,” was how he evaluated his drive. That said, rear panel damage inflicted by a fence pole on his GR Yaris Rally1 suggested he was prepared to push hard when the opportunity presented itself.
4.2 seconds behind him was M-Sport Ford’s Craig Breen whose preparations for Ypres – an event he won as recently as 2019 – could not have gone any worse after the team’s test car developed an under bonnet fire. He found himself on the backfoot from the word go despite getting the chance to hone his Puma Rally1 during shakedown.
A numb front end that imbued the Irishman with “no confidence” and failing wipers when the heavens opened added to the list of fixes his mechanics had to address at the end of the morning loop. His elevation up the timesheets from ninth was aided by dogged determination, Rovanpera’s departure and some rotten luck involving team-mate Adrien Fourmaux.
Fourth as he entered SS4 – ‘Langemark’ – a heavy rain shower pretty much brought the Frenchman to a crawl and his good early work was undone in a handful of painfully slow miles. “I think it’s always the same,” exclaimed the Frenchman. “We get the rain at the end. I could not do anything else – it was full of water and we lost all the hard work we did this morning. It’s like that.”
With the weather maps suggesting heavy pulses of rain for the afternoon Tanak, as the first car on the road, was keen to capitalise on whatever good fortune ended up being thrown his way. Conditions were, as he pointed out, “tricky”, but as grip deteriorated less than what many had predicted as the sun shone brightly, he didn’t get such a march on those behind him.
Evans, meanwhile, held firm despite telling stage end reporters he was “not as clinical” as he ought to have been. At that moment the tide started to turn against him and on the penultimate stage he dropped the ball to the tune of 5 seconds – a big enough number for him to fall behind Tanak and for Neuville to move ahead of them both thanks to a perfectly-worked scratch time.
To add insult to injury, Evans was handed a 10 second penalty for arriving at the start of Friday’s closing test a minute late. “There’s that - and it’s just not been a great afternoon,” he said. “We had a slow puncture after the second stage, so we were having to use a rain tyre on this stage which was not ideal.”
Lappi was unable to make any inroads on the top three even though he had the backing of Team Principal Jari-Matti Latvala to be “a bit more aggressive” with his approach. Breen, in fifth, was left cursing his luck as his gamble to run with wet tyres failed to come off but given the gap to him and fellow M-Sport Ford driver Gus Greensmith is the best part of 40 seconds, he won’t have to look over his shoulder too much.
Oliver Solberg nursed is I20 N Rally1 to the end of Friday after it was struck down by transmission gremlins. All things considered, it was a mature display by the young Swede who is building his speed up “step-by-step”.
