He led for more than half of the stages, won four of them and took the fight to Toyota in a way that – by his own admission – he hasn’t done since his title-winning season.
What changed for Thierry Neuville in Greece last week?
When Neuville almost won in Croatia and then did win in Portugal earlier this season, he was quick to caveat both performances with the detail that Toyota had, in some way or another, hit trouble. He’d felt good, but not great, aboard his own Hyundai i20 N Rally1.
The Acropolis has offered Neuville a decent return in recent years: he led before a puncture last season and won in 2024. Last week, he needed to find some of that feeling again. He did just that.
The team evolved the i20 through the event to the point that, even when he missed the win after a penultimate-stage double puncture, Neuville was still smiling.
He told DirtFish: “I really realized this weekend that for a long, long time I haven’t been really 100% comfortable in the car. And this weekend, it was not far from perfect. And that makes such a whole difference if you want to fight against Sébastien [Ogier] and Toyota in general.
“It was a long time ago [I had this feeling]. A very long time ago. Somewhere, I would say, in 2024.”
Talking more specifically about the changes in the car, he added: “Obviously we worked a bit on the diff side for this weekend. I came back to something more locked and maybe more consistent than what I have been using on the last one and a half year. I mean it worked here, let’s see how it works on the other rallies.”
The other rallies on the immediate horizon are Estonia and Finland. Last year, Neuville and Hyundai were absolutely on the pace of Toyota – only Finland’s local hero Kalle Rovanperä could get the better of Hyundai before both Neuville and Adrien Fourmaux punctured In Jyväskylä. And a podium third came after Neuville led early on in Tartu.
“We were super-fast in Estonia and Finland last year,” said Neuville. “So you can only cross fingers that we have a similar speed.”
Reflecting more on his round eight pace in Loutraki, Neuville pointed to the positives.
“That’s what we are searching for as a team,” he explained. “Considering that we had the pace once more after Portugal to fight for victory the whole time, the whole weekend, is something very positive, obviously.
“We cannot be disappointed [with second], because we felt there was an opportunity for victory and we felt that we were in the fight and we could control the race. But we know Toyota is very strong, we know Sébastien is very strong, and we knew that probably the first [of us] to get hit by trouble would probably lose out for victory and that has been the case this weekend.”
