Acropolis Rally Greece is always expected to be a rally of attrition. But few could have imagined just how punishing this edition was going to be.
Toyota finishing 16th, 18th and 30th, while M-Sport’s factory-nominated cars mustered 21st and a DNF, was indicative of how much of a marathon the World Rally Championship’s trip to Greece turned into.
But the Acropolis being rough, tough and punishing is nothing new. We knew that already. Look beyond the rocky roads of central Greece and there were key narratives to be found under the surface.
Hyundai is in control of the 2024 season
Wind the clock back to Kenya and the notion seemed inconceivable. On the ‘other’ round widely regarded as a car-breaker, the Hyundai i20s broke. Thierry Neuville limped his ailing car through Saturday afternoon, its fuel pump broken, hybrid broken and then on Sunday, its suspension broken. Esapekka Lappi’s transmission failed twice. Ott Tänak hit a rock and crashed. It was a catastrophe – although they rescued some points back on Sunday.
This was the Hyundai wobble we’d been used to seeing in the Rally1 era. Its car had been late to begin building, then scrapped and started over at the 11th hour. That reset had consequences. It had been playing catch-up to Toyota ever since. And it was, frankly, trounced in 2023.
It's all smiles in the Hyundai camp after a somewhat unexpected 1-2-3 in Greece
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Finland seemed like an aberration – Hyundai lucking into to a healthy haul of points after a shocking 15 minutes where Elfyn Evans and Kalle Rovanperä both crashed out of the rally (the latter entirely unavoidable). Greece felt different. Yes, two turbo failures on two cars in the same day is an incredibly rare and possibly unforeseeable outcome. But the damage is done.
The Alzenau machines weren’t without mechanical problems in Greece – Neuville suffered a misfire on Friday morning and Tänak also briefly faced similar strife on the final day. But the i20 N Rally1s held up. As did the drivers.
Takamoto Katsuta binning his Yaris while in a strong position for the fourth time this season meant Toyota’s insurance policy for the manufacturers’ championship was in the bin just as it most needed it.
Hyundai now has the closest imaginable thing to an open goal to shoot at. Neuville and his team-mates merely need to stroke the ball into the back of the net and run off celebrating. The championship is by no means over – but with Neuville possessing a 34-point lead over his own team-mate, plus Hyundai now 35 points ahead in the makes’ race, it would take a monumental disaster sustained over multiple rallies for Hyundai to throw this away.
It’s now at the point where Toyota team principal Jari-Matti Latvala has waved the white flag. He’s given up thinking about the championship and told his team to focus on winning the last three rallies instead, bean counting be damned.
Never before has Hyundai won both championships. Now the only thing stopping that from happening is Hyundai itself.
Neuville has banished the ghosts of 2018
Question marks have lingered in some quarters over Neuville’s ability to stick the landing when it comes to a championship challenge. Whether he’d ever get a title charge across the line is a somewhat inevitable question when you’ve finished as runner-up five times – always the bridesmaid, never the bride, is a rather unavoidable phrase. But one rally in particular has always hung like a dark cloud over Neuville’s ability to seal the deal: Australia 2018.
Neuville's ragged 2018 finale can be consigned to the memory banks
In 2017, his first time in a proper title battle with Ogier, he’d taken a wheel off on Germany’s Panzerplatte stage and made his life harder. When faced with the need to push in Spain, he did, hit a stone and broke the suspension. But when he went off the road three times during 2018’s season finale – the third time terminally – it raised the question of whether he had the mettle to deal with the pressure of the title fight when the heat was on.
Ogier still believed he was facing off against that version of Neuville. When he deployed his road-sweeping jibe, it was calculated and pre-meditated, delivering the same quip not only to DirtFish but everyone with a microphone on Friday afternoon. He was trying to get into Neuville’s head.
He failed completely. Neuville simply refused to bite. There was no attempt to one-up the eight-time world champion, just silence. Just complete focus on “our plan”. And he executed that plan perfectly. Ogier, meanwhile, chucked his car off the road, refusing to slow down in frustration at discovering he had a puncture on the final stage.
Six years on from Australia, the roles had been reversed. Ogier was the one to slip up. The eight-time champion would have surrendered all his Sunday points stopping to change the offending tire anyway – but the car wouldn’t have ended up on its roof.
Estonia has a post-Tänak future lined up
For Estonian fans the Acropolis was not a classic. Their man Ott Tänak finishing third, albeit scoring some healthy Sunday points, meant a second world title heading for Saaremaa is even less likely this year. But the support classes had two good-news stories for the Baltic nation that hint at a legacy once Tänak decides to hang up his helmet.
History was made in Acropolis with the first-ever WRC2 tiebreaker. Sami Pajari took the win on countback – but Robert Virves ending dead level with Toyota’s latest Finnish prodigy after a last-stage push, coupled with a tire off the rim for Pajari, was the shot in the arm the 2022 Junior WRC champion’s career desperately needed.
Virves was only in Greece thanks to a crowdfunding effort led by Rally Estonia organizer Urmo Aava and Estonian sports commentator Kalev Kruus. The €50,000 of backing it raised got him to the Acropolis. It delivered his career-best result – and, importantly, some headlines for a driver who’s struggled to make entry lists anywhere since his WRC2 prize drives ran dry.
Virves came agonizingly close to WRC2 victory - but, together with Jürgenson, proved that the future is bright for Estonia
Getting in the mix with WRC2’s pacesetters – Oliver Solberg, Pajari and Yohan Rossel – on pace alone has been a tough ask for the entire field this year. Drivers with top-level experience have tried and failed. When Virves suddenly returned for Sardinia, he’d been away from the cockpit of a rally car for eight months. A month later he’d scored his first WRC2 podium and then in Greece, come 0.1 seconds away from a first win. It would be a great shame not to see how he fares across a whole season in a front-running WRC2 machine in 2025.
The third tier delivered yet more good news for Estonian rallying too. Two years ago, Romet Jürgenson was playing the WRC 9 video game, his amateur rallying days long behind him. Fast forward to September 2024 and he was crowned Junior WRC champion, winning with it a full season of WRC2 – some rounds covered by the standard M-Sport prize for all champions, the rest by the FIA Rally Star talent identification system that discovered him in the first place.
Jürgenson was arguably the most deserving driver of the accolade – he’d led the way at some point of every single round of the season, topped the rally classification for 41% of all stages during the year and won more than twice as many stages compared to the rest of the Junior field. But retirements in Finland and Sardinia meant the pressure was on to deliver on the double-points-scoring finale. He coped with the pressure and delivered the result needed; only a Saturday puncture robbed him of a chance to end his season with a win.
There are other Estonians further down the rallying pyramid who also make up part of Estonia’s next generation: Jaspar Vaher and Karl-Markus Sei come to mind. But next season, if all works out, there should be two Estonians in the box seat to try and impress the Rally1 teams.
