Neuville experienced issues in the morning, ultimately falling more than half a minute behind the leaders. His task was already challenging from the start due to his role as the road sweeper, and technical problems didn’t help matters.
The worst part, however, is that the root cause of the issue remains unknown.
“We don’t know. We’ve worked quite a lot on the car between the stages, trying to fix it. The problem is still there. So the guys trying to read the data now. And they’re going to fix it for this afternoon,” Neuville explained.
“It’s misfiring. It’s running on three cylinders, and I don’t know more. We lost the power in the stage, in the first part of the stage. I had, I don’t know, 30% less power most of the time.,” Neuville detailed.
Neuville attempted to diagnose the issue himself but was unsuccessful.
“We checked everything we could on our own, and what we have in the car that we can change. Obviously, we didn’t find the issue, and it’s coming and going, so it’s very hard to know from a distance what the team could do,” Neuville said.
He also struggled with his starting position, as being the road sweeper at Acropolis Rally is even more challenging than usual.
“It was difficult, but the technical issues made it a bit more challenging. We worked a lot on the car between stages, but every time, we ran out of time and couldn’t really find any solution to the problem,” Neuville lamented.
In terms of the championship battle, Sebastien Ogier is now in a strong position as he leads the rally, but the Frenchman is forced to manage the situation entirely on his own. There’s no help coming from his teammates, as Elfyn Evans’ and Takamoto Katsuta’s rallies went completely awry in the morning.
Ogier handled the morning well, setting an impressive fastest time on the newly introduced Tarzan stage. He used a different tyre strategy, which paid off.
“It wasn’t a good morning for Toyota. Obviously, Sebastien is in the lead. He made a good tyre choice, which, in my opinion, was the best tyre choice this morning. He was in a bit more attack mode, but it worked. From our side, we’re not so far behind Dani. We’re following our approach, and without the problems, we would have been a bit faster,” Neuville speculated.
