Why I share Neuville’s road order frustration

There was a handshake of acceptance; they felt like they’d done all they could. But a smash of the steering wheel seconds before, complemented by some clearly frustrated hand movements, suggested this was no celebratory embrace.

You certainly didn’t need to be a body language expert to work out that the upcoming stage-end interview with Thierry Neuville was going to be a corker.

Paul King was armed with the mic, and pointed out that Neuville had finished the day quite strongly judging by his speed on the splits. Had he had a bit of a push?

“Yeah, yeah,” Neuville began, simultaneously shaking his head in disbelief. “I tried to catch at least one position but… yeah, I don’t know what to say.”

Except he did.

“Obviously strategy to win the championship is not the same anymore, it’s changed a lot rallying,” Neuville continued.

“Now it seems like doing a part season is much more fun and a bigger benefit for everything, so something to think about.”

Yikes.

Was this purely frustration of spending yet another day road sweeping, all while part-timers Kalle Rovanperä and Sébastien Ogier cashed in with their better start positions to lie first and third, rising to the surface? Or a political statement Neuville had already planned?

More than likely it was a mixture of the two. But regardless, Neuville said it and, obviously, the matter was discussed in the end-of-day media zone – prompting some quite interesting (and actually rather spiky) responses from some of his rivals.

We’ve also dedicated some good time to the whole debate on this week’s episode of the podcast too, which you can listen to just below.

But I wanted to mull over this topic myself in written-form too, because I’d already begun forming the basis of an opinion column on this topic, even before Neuville hurled his road order grenade onto the agenda.

So this is why I ultimately agree with Thierry, and what I reckon could be a solution for 2025 onwards. But first, let’s understand how we’ve reached this point.

Why this reared its head in Latvia

Context is always key to understanding any situation, and in this instance it looks as if a mixture of Neuville’s 2024 success working against him, coupled to the sharply rising form of his team-mate Ott Tänak and a unique itinerary on Rally Latvia has sparked this reaction.

That awesome victory to open the season in Monte Carlo earned Neuville an early championship lead which, eight rounds in, he is yet to lose. With the new points structure offering two clear ways to score strong points from a weekend, it’s proved very difficult for any of the three title contenders to make significant strides on one another.

But Neuville is beginning to suffer; first by dropping the ball in Sardinia and slipping off the road and now by continually running first on the road throughout a streak of seven consecutive gravel rallies. On each, Neuville faces the worst of the conditions and is essentially guaranteed to lose time on Friday and then, unless there are major retirements or setbacks, lose more on Saturday as his lower overall position keeps him towards the front of the running order.

This phenomenon is true for all rallies, but is more pronounced on the fast events where such small margins split the field making it even harder to recover positions, then further exaggerated in Latvia – firstly because there were no retirements or significant problems at all on the first day, and secondly by the event’s atypical itinerary.

Instead of following the usual ‘cloverleaf’ format where a loop of stages is run in the morning then repeated in the afternoon, Latvia mixed it up with just two of Friday’s full stages and only sections of others running as second passes – making road cleaning even worse for the leader.

That left Neuville slowest of all the Rally1 drivers on merit (which clearly he isn’t on pure ability, even on a fast rally like Latvia which isn’t necessarily his forte) all while the top three that night was occupied by drivers who aren’t contesting a full championship season.

Maybe he could’ve picked his timing better, as Neuville’s argument has to be quantified by the considerable emotion and adrenalin coursing through his body at the time he delivered it, as well as the fact there’s an obvious degree of self-interest behind what he’s saying.

He wasn’t this outspoken on the topic a few years back when it was infuriating Sébastien Ogier, was he? But nevertheless, Neuville is effectively being punished for doing a better job than everyone else, so perhaps you can understand why this has really started to get to him.

The part-time driver problem

While they clearly pointed to a much wider issue, Neuville’s stage-end comments took aim at one thing in particular: part-time drivers.

They’re nothing new in the WRC, and nor is the disgruntlement caused if they go on to win. We need only cast our minds back eight years to Rally Portugal 2016, where Kris Meeke’s comfortable win came under fire as he cashed in on a low starting position on Friday and Saturday to romp over half a minute clear by the end of day one.

Meeke and Citroën only did half the season in 2016, as development of the C3 WRC for the all-new 2017 regulations took priority. So Meeke would often find himself down the championship by virtue of skipping events, and therefore benefited from a lower starting position.

At the time, Volkswagen team principal Jost Capito suggested this was devaluing the WRC as it sent the public a confusing message: the driver who won the rally wasn’t a championship contender, while the driver leading the championship (VW driver Ogier) wasn’t able to compete with him.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? Except now the issue is even thornier because today’s part-time drivers are driving for a team that is a full-time competitor.

This season, both of the championship’s heavyweights actively run one of its cars exclusively for part-time drivers. Hyundai has a rotating cast of Esapekka Lappi, Dani Sordo and Andreas Mikkelsen to partner Neuville and Tänak; meanwhile Toyota can call upon Rovanperä or Ogier to support Elfyn Evans and Takamoto Katsuta.

That means at least 25% of the Rally1 starters on any 2024 WRC event aren’t full-time competitors. In Latvia, that figure stood at 40% with Toyota entering both Rovanperä and Ogier – a strategy it’s looking increasingly fond of – and M-Sport running Mārtiņš Sesks in a third Puma along with Lappi’s presence for Hyundai.

Just six drivers – Neuville, Tänak, Evans, Katsuta, Adrien Fourmaux and Grégoire Munster – are scheduled to compete on all 13 rounds of the championship, equating to less than 50% of those to have competed this year in a Rally1 car.

In short, part-time drivers in the WRC have never been more fashionable – but it’s the quality of said drivers that is the real root of the problem. In the main, there are no issues with younger stars like Sesks getting odd chances to shine by coming in and mixing it up, but world champions like Rovanperä and Ogier profiting from lower starting positions is another story altogether.

Particularly if your overalls have a Hyundai badge on them like Neuville’s do.

You could argue Ogier perhaps deserves this recompense after the severe handicap he was laden with during his dominant VW spell. But that’s besides the point. The road order system was designed to equalize performance across the field, but drivers as good as Rovanperä and Ogier don’t need that kind of help.

While Neuville has never explicitly stated it, Toyota’s ability to always have a world champion (who are proven winners even from the head of the running order) starting an event in a good position has clearly riled Neuville.

Although it must be said, there’s a massive degree of irony there – as Evans was only too keen to point out – that Hyundai has utilized part-time drivers more than any other team since it returned to the WRC 11 seasons ago.

What’s the solution?

Maybe you don’t feel there needs to be a solution. Perhaps you think Neuville, to quote Evans again here, just needs to “get on with it”. The championship leader facing the worst of the conditions on the opening day of a gravel rally is absolutely nothing new – why the sudden need for change?

I can understand those arguments, but I do think there’s been an accidental step change for the worse this season. Personally, it does feel as if the championship contenders are now too heavily handicapped. And as mentioned back in the intro, this is what I was originally contemplating highlighting this week before Neuville suddenly raised the stakes of the argument.

By the end of Friday, the highest-placed championship contender was Tänak in sixth. Only two of this year’s eight rallies so far have been won by full-time drivers competing for the title. And don’t forget that amazing, but ultimately embarrassing, storyline last year of Ogier leading the championship after Rally México, despite missing Rally Sweden.

I don’t feel it’s a good look for the WRC to have its supposed best drivers continually overshadowed – and I’m sure I’m not alone in holding that view. Neuville at least reckons it’s not what manufacturers want to see.

Yes, this year’s title race is extraordinarily close, with just 13 points splitting the top three, but that title fight should be front and center of everything, not buried behind any other narratives.

So what is the solution? For me there are two: either remove the ability for manufacturer teams to regularly rotate the driver of one of its permanent entries, or find a new way to determine road position for the opening leg.

The second is generally a symptom of the first, as without so many regular part-time drivers the calls for any road order changes were quieter, if even at all existent. But I believe we have now reached a point where the road order system should be revamped, regardless of what happens with part-timers.

It’s time to reintroduce the qualifying stage.

OK, I hear you – qualifying is for circuit racing. But there’s an awful lot about modern-day rallying that’s similar to the roundy-roundy stuff. In its nature, meticulously studying onboards is far more Max Verstappen than it is Max McRae, let’s be honest.

And I totally understand the shouts that qualifying (which ran in the WRC from 2012-13 and is still used in the ERC today) places too much onus on one single pass of a stage, where inevitably the road order debate will rear its ugly head anyway with whoever goes first at the same disadvantage the entire system is trying to mitigate.

But to that I say: why does the qualifying stage have to operate the same way it did before?

At a time when the WRC’s media offering is being greatly considered, surely there is an opportunity here to create a sellable TV product? Keep one or two runs of shakedown to allow drivers to get a feel for the stage, remove the road cleaning problem and keep the option open for VIP passenger rides, but then launch a qualifying session and stream it live to the world where each driver is allowed two or three attempts at the stage, and the eventual leaderboard dictates Friday’s running order: fastest last on gravel; first on Tarmac.

How much more exciting would that be than a shakedown stage? And at a time where Formula 1 is booming and the WRC is sadly waning, offering a qualifying session – a term and concept F1 fans know and understand – can hardly be the worst idea within a sport with plenty of nuances and intimidating jargon?

Besides, qualifying would then enrich the presence of part-time drivers too who are, at least in my opinion, an exciting addition to the mix, just not if they have too large a power-up over the rest of the field. They’d bring more cars to the battle, but not totally destroy the weekends of season regulars.

Would it be competitive? It’s hard to see why not, given how closely matched the current WRC field is. Yes, Ogier totally dominated qualifying back in 2013 for Volkswagen, meaning his inevitable championship title was even more of a walkover than it might have been (the several unsuccessful attempts at altering the road order rules to slow Ogier prove he would still have won that season), but we don’t currently have one driver and car head and shoulders above the rest.

This is sketchy science because shakedown times don’t strictly matter for anything – and after all running simulations on the 2023 season with 2024’s points structure only revealed one instance where the rally winner didn’t score the most points. And we all know that’s not how this season has panned out so far.

But for now, if we assume the fastest driver on shakedown topped qualifying, we’d have been left with a ‘pole position’ for six different drivers from eight rallies this year. Only Tänak would have multiple (three) after a hot streak of back-to-back quickest times in Poland and Latvia, with Lappi, Rovanperä, Ogier, Sordo and Neuville all on one apiece.

And as for the argument that WRC would’ve been robbed of the sensational Sesks story had he not had that road position? He was fifth quickest on shakedown at Poland, and fourth in Latvia – more than good enough to have made some form of impact.

I’m not going to be so arrogant as to proclaim this a must-do solution, but I’m convinced it at least has legs. Spice up Thursdays, make road position fairer and ensure the winner of the rally really is the driver who did the out-and-out best job, no questions asked.

But no matter what you feel should be done or what you believe is right, Neuville was right about one thing. It most certainly has given us something to think about.