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, three of Friday’s seven 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.
“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 Autosport.
“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.”
Neuville has already found the limits during Thursday morning’s shakedown, when he was fortunate to survive a wild venture into a ditch.
“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.
“It's disturbing, 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 road, so it's a bit of a concern, but generally speaking, I guess that the organiser will do the job to make sure that they are in place every time.”
Neuville’s nearest title rival, Evans, added: “It's not very natural, the character of the stage and it's not very nice to drive.
“When they [the anti-cut devices] are not where you expect them to be, [that] is the issue because you start to open up a whole can of worms where the inside of corners haven't been checked.
“We will have to wait to see how it plays out, but I don't think it's ideal.”
M-Sport Ford’s Adrien Fourmaux echoed Evans’ thoughts and went as far as to say it was a “nightmare” situation in shakedown: “The wooden poles are a bit of a nightmare. They change too much the angle of the corners, and we study this a lot.”
“Then when somebody cuts the corner [and the posts are gone] we then start to cut in some places that have not been checked, there could be rocks or something. The poles are placed too much on the road and not in the cut.”
