World rally champion Thierry Neuville described his Friday at the Monte Carlo Rally as a “day to forget” after a mistake and a puncture resulted in two offs at the same corner.
The Hyundai driver ended Friday in eighth position, 3m58.6s from the lead which he held heading into the day’s stages.
Neuville made an error on stage six losing almost two minutes when he misjudged a tight right hairpin and fired into a ditch. The Belgian managed to recover the car but had to drag his left-rear wheel through the remaining kilometres back to service.
Bizarrely, he went off at the same corner in the afternoon after becoming one of the first drivers to suffer a puncture on the new-for-2025 Hankook rubber.
“Obviously a day to forget. I made mistake this morning and I misjudged the braking with the studded tyres and the target this afternoon was to see if we could catch up a bit of time,” said Neuville.
“But then we had a puncture three kilometres into the stage [stage nine], and not knowing the tyre very well we were hesitating whether to continue or not continue, but we decided to continue with the puncture.
“The tyre went in that specific braking [area] and luckily we had done the recce [of that ditch] this morning so we knew how to avoid any damage.
“I’m disappointed for the one mistake this morning. After that a puncture can happen to anybody and we have to analyse.
“The tyres are new and I don’t know where it punctured, I don’t think we have got much information out of it because the tyre is obviously destroyed. There is not much we can learn from that but we will try to have a better day tomorrow.”
Although frustrated by the mistake, Neuville revealed that he wasn’t overly happy with his i20 N’s set up and will revert to settings used on Thursday's stages.
“I wasn’t satisfied today [with the car]. We did some changes overnight for the day and I couldn’t find the confidence I needed all day long, there were plenty of surprises,” he added.
“It wasn’t a fun day in the car but we will go back to something we used on Thursday to see if I feel more comfortable.”
