Neuville suffered a tire puncture and fell to sixth place after subsequent issues. However, his teammates Esapekka Lappi and Ott Tänak faced challenges during the afternoon loop, propelling the leading Belgian in the championship to fight for podium positions.
Toyota’s Takamoto Katsuta, currently in third, is just over six seconds ahead of Neuville. The gap to Elfyn Evans, who is in second place, is 10.4 seconds.
“We’re going to keep fighting. Obviously it’s not nice to see to my team-mates to retire. It’s another bad day here in Kenya for Hyundai,” Neuville expressed his disappointment.
“And for sure, it’s difficult for me as well when I hear about Lappi’s problems. To be 100% confident and to attack 100% in some places where it’s really rough is challenging because I don’t want to face the same issues.”
After his morning tire puncture, Neuville had to resort to some MacGyver-like tricks as the right rear of his car took a beating from the exploding tire. Neuville and co-driver Martijn Wydaeghe put on ski goggles and masks to protect themselves from dust. Local tree was also used in the car’s makeshift repairs.
“It was a challenging day out there, an exhausting day, I would say. We were fighting with a few little issues, but mainly the puncture, which cost us a bit of time. There was also the dust in the car today,” Neuville summarized.
“This afternoon, we had a little bit of a moment where I completely lost the steering out of my hands, and we went on two wheels. Luckily, we got away with that. In the last stage, we tried to do as well as we could, but obviously, there was still a lot of cleaning this afternoon. I think we fought hard, but we would have preferred better results.”
