Nobody wants to be a shadow.
Forging your own path, creating your own identity and writing a legend that’s truly yours is far preferable to following in the footsteps of someone else.
Even if that someone else is your brother who’s achieved exactly what you’re striving to do.
Introducing Tom Heindrichs – a 21-year-old Belgian who, this year, is an Opel driver in the Junior European Rally Championship courtesy of winning the Opel e-Rally Cup.
His brother? None other than 2024 World Rally champion Thierry Neuville.
“When I was 10, I was watching him already driving in the WRC,” Heindrichs tells DirtFish. “So this is where I got the inspiration.
Tom was 10 and watching when his half-brother Thierry won his first WRC event
“Of course I was in school, so I didn’t have time to go watching him anywhere other than in Germany, because Germany was just one hour from us,” he continues. “And actually my co-driver Jonas [Schmitz], he’s also from my area, and we were always watching together.
“When we were I think 10 or 12, we watched him and then said, ‘When we are 18, we’re going to drive in the East Belgium Rally’. This is like our home rally, but also quite popular in Belgium. And this is how we have done it. We just decided to go rallying – had no budget, but we found it and we started.”
As the differing surname suggests, Neuville and Heindrichs are half brothers. There’s a 16-year age gap. But in their home town of St Vith, everybody knew the bloodline.
The advantage of this – as seen by Kalle Rovanperä, Oliver Solberg, Max McRae et al – is more attention and therefore more potential opportunity at a younger age. The cost is tied to the same topic: more attention and more pressure at a younger age.
Asking a driver if this situation is a benefit or a hindrance is ultimately a futile question, because they themselves don’t know any different. But talking to Heindrichs, what’s clear is he’s determined to do things his own way.
Neuville gifted him one of his LifeLive company’s crosscars for example, but Heindrichs had to fix it himself. And the last thing he wants to do is lean on his brother’s reputation.
Heindrichs is determined to be his own man
“In our area, because we have many small villages let’s say, everyone knows all the stories from everyone else. It’s impossible to hide something,” Heindrichs says, “so of course here in our area everyone knew it [the connection].
“If I go somewhere else in Belgium, like in Ypres or somewhere, there they don’t know it. But still then all the media wrote about it and it was not… yeah, of course it was pressure.
“I would say more in the crosscar, then it was real pressure because I was driving in his team, and I always had the pressure of also delivering something and this. I think there I lost quite a lot of potential for myself because it was just too much pressure for me.
“But then I started just to try to use the pressure differently. When I was doing rallying, I started to use it more as an advantage, to take the name to make my name also more popular. It was a motivation to me and this is still my motivation.
“This is nothing against him [Neuville], but now my motivation is to get better than him so I get my own name. This is why I work so hard. At the end, I don’t want to compare myself with him. I want to prove myself that I own my own name, let’s say. I don’t have to be the brother of… I can be Tom Heindrichs and everyone sees me as Tom Heindrichs. It’s now a motivation.”
That means that despite having a fantastic resource at his disposal, Heindrichs chooses to limit what he asks Neuville.
“Quite simple: not a lot,” he replies when asked if he uses his brother for advice. “This is really important for me, to show myself that I can do it by myself.
“And I also want to do mistakes, because this is where you can learn. If I ask him too much, I feel that later on, I will miss this experience of doing mistakes, and then I will feel the pressure. Now it’s still not good to make mistakes, but now it’s not that important. When you get to the WRC, for example, one big mistake or something, and it can be over.
“So I just try to do the simple mistakes and do them now in the early ages, so I can analyze them and I don’t repeat it. That’s my thinking behind it. And I’m sure if I would ask him something, he would directly answer it and help me. But I’m not that guy. I feel like I prefer to do mistakes to learn from them.”
It’s a commendable approach, but that comes as no surprise when you examine his rallying CV to-date.
From the very outset, Heindrichs has tackled his rallying as a career path. There’s always been a clear target, strategy and plan. Year one was spent in the Stellantis Cup Belux. Year two he won it. Then he made the switch from Rally4 to electric for the Opel e-Rally Cup and won.
The next challenge is the Junior ERC – widely recognized as the most competitive front-wheel-drive championship in the world. That’s ideal for Heindrichs, who is driven by a challenge.
Winning the Opel e-Rally Cup was the latest step in a journey Heindrichs hopes takes him to the top
“This is also where you get better, when the level is high,” he explains. “Because if you are always the fastest and doing everything, you don’t improve. If you have a really high level, and you have faster drivers than you, this is where you can improve.
“And this is what I want. I want challenges every year. And I knew that when I went to the e-Cup, because electric is completely different than the Rally4 was. I knew that it would be a big challenge, this is also why we struggled at the beginning of the year. But I like challenges, this is where you get stronger and this is what makes you a better driver and a better person also.
“I can tell you, for example, four years ago I had no confidence in myself. I was so shy. It would have been impossible to talk like this with you. Rallying also made me stronger as a person. And this is cool. This is what I like.”
This season will provide more evidence as to whether Heindrichs has what it takes to follow Neuville into the WRC, but the end of 2025 was already strong proof.
On just his second event in a Rally2 car, and first in a Citroën C3 after a short test, the 21-year-old was setting the pace at Spa Rally before a trio of punctures consigned him to third.
Frustrating for most; ultimately pleasing for Heindrichs.
“I mean, frustration is never good,” he says. “During the interviews and all this stuff, I always try to remember first of all, how lucky I am to drive a Rally2 car and then to be already this competitive. At the end, I was just so happy about the weekend.
Heindrichs was low on Rally2 experience but performed superbly at the end of last year
“Of course it’s a shame because we would have won the rally without the punctures. But that’s part of the game and at the end maybe it’s better because now we are analyzing why did we puncture? Because of the three times at least one was our mistake.
“At the end, now everyone in Belgium is just talking about us, no-one matters that [Cédric] Cherain won with the Porsche. It’s incredible but everyone is just talking about usm so no, of course I’m happy. This was the target: to show my pace.”
Heindrichs plans to carry that ethos into the Junior ERC. Even though the reward for winning Junior ERC is a Junior WRC program – as has been the case for Jean-Baptsite Franceschi, Laurent Pellier, Norbert Maior, Mille Johansson (last year’s champion) and now Calle Carlberg – Heindrichs is prioritizing performance over the end result.
“If we can win the championship then the target and full focus will be on winning the championship, but we don’t have to win the championship to get further,” he believes.
“I think it’s more about the performance and this is where my concentration is, because still my biggest goal is to have a contract and drive for a team in the world championship. And so I’m more about trying to really impress the others.
“So for me personally it’s all about performing, and of course if we can win the championship it’s the target, but it’s more about performance this year.”
After all, Tom Heindrichs isn’t about being in anyone’s shadow, rather emerging from it.
