Thierry Neuville has been driving for Hyundai longer than Oliver Solberg, Sami Pajari, Adrien Fourmaux and Josh McErlean have been rallying, full stop.
His loyalty and commitment to the brand knows no bounds. Ever since Hyundai returned to the championship in 2014, Neuville’s been in the lineup.
It’s not just a workplace, it’s Neuville’s home.
But unfortunately homes aren’t always the happiest of places. Neuville won the world title with Hyundai in 2024, but things have been fairly bleak since. Has he lost motivation since he ended his long wait to become world champion? Is he still the same driver he was? Or is the team’s competitive position simply too challenging at times?
Andrea Adamo has another theory. Appearing on the latest episode of If You Permit Me To Say – a Club DirtFish exclusive podcast – the former Hyundai boss believes that Neuville is suffering the consequences of carrying the team on his shoulders.
Adamo was Neuville's team principal between 2019 and 2021
“I don’t know him better than anyone, but I did have the possibility to understand him when we were working together,” Adamo said. “And for sure he is the kind of person that is taking the challenge very [much] as a personal one.
“Rightly or not, but surely rightly from his point of view, he is trying to keep, let me permit to say, Hyundai on his own shoulders, maybe more than his real job [of driving], and he feels that he has to do it to keep the team together.
“Being the person he is – that is a very nice person, he’s someone with a much bigger heart than what people may think – he’s trying to hold everything together, to try to do more than maybe what is possible to do, to let things run better and smoother. And this sometimes puts yourself in a loop with too much mental effort: you have to focus on so many things and this can create then a series of consequences, no?”
Typically, Adamo has an example to illustrate his point.
“If you jump in the car and you think just to go fast, it’s one sort of approach. If you are driving and you think about many things that even if you are not really thinking in this moment, but it’s a mental effort, maybe the global picture becomes more complicated. And I have the feeling that maybe he’s carrying himself with too many responsibilities and trying to do so many things rightly, because I know him, you know.
“He can also say, as long as it’s working, it’s working, if not, I will find something else. Instead, he’s trying really… because we cannot also forget that since day one, Thierry was there. So he feels himself very much part of it and feels maybe more responsible than what it is to keep everything together.”
Hyundai has evolved over the years, but Neuville has been the constant – through the bad times and the good. His work ethic, and approach to finding solutions, marks him out, but is equally reminiscent of one of his former team-mates.
“There is one thing of Thierry that I always appreciate: you can fight with him, but when things are getting cold, you can sit and discuss and clarify and he will never close the door, but always try to find solutions and he will always try to make the things work,” Adamo explained.
No matter the point of contention, Neuville and Adamo always found a way to move forward
“We had, of course working together, some moments, but we always, I don’t want to say turn the page, because there were no page to turn, but we always say, how we move on, how we find solution, how we get better as a team. That is not something that you often find. There were people that were there when they need you and then they disappear and there were people that if you fight with them, then you close the door.
“Ott [Tänak] was like this in his own way, but honestly it’s another one that is like this in in my opinion. They are much more similar than what people may think.”
Activate your Club DirtFish Gold membership to listen to Adamo’s podcast in full, where he also discusses Hyundai’s chances in Croatia, what he’d change about WRC testing and his memoirs of the final Group B season in 1986.
