Hyundai had registered Neuville for the Lithuanian rally, where his teammate Esapekka Lappi was also looking to gain driving experience. However, due to Ott Tänak’s severe crash during the ERC rally in Estonia, Neuville’s plans fell through.
Now, the Rally Latvia is ahead, and Neuville has to start with incomplete preparation.
“Obviously it’s about missing mileage. We had a long list of items we wanted to test. I tried to do on shakedown today, but no real conclusion, because the shakedown was really rutted,” Neuville told RallyJournal.com.
” On the second pass, the stage was surprisingly rutted already and third pass was really bad. I couldn’t really validate what I, what we wanted to test, so I have to decide now, whatever. I stick with those things and and see how it works tomorrow.”
Neuville did not blame his teammate Tänak for the lost testing opportunity.
“There was motivation to fix the car. I think we decide together not to put at risk our participation here for missing parts or whatever. It would have been nice to do the rally, but if I have to go there and make sure that I do not damage anything, I will not be driving very well. I’m not sure testing would have helped for anything,” Neuville said.
“At the end I think it was a common decision.”
In the opening run of the shakedown for Rally Latvia, Neuville came close to crashing. The car went deep into a ditch, but the Belgian escaped with a scare.
“There was no damage except the bumper. The whole dynamic was a bit influenced. Anyhow, we had to come back to change differentials, and so the guys fixed quickly the car and we were able to do our repeated run and and improve a bit the setup,” Neuville explained.
“We did some setup change, quite a lot of setup change. After Poland we decided to try different things to somehow find more performance on first pass conditions. I focused mainly on that because tomorrow is basically only first pass. It’s going to be a long day.”
