[WRC] News & Rumours 2021

[mknight]

Loeb just won a rally when he went to Hyundai. If you want to nitpick you could add Tanak to those struggling drivers, this year he is 3/4 in stage wins with half the nummer of the leader (Neuville), last year he had almost double Neuville's number. Breen with his 1 good rally out of 4 starts could also be added.

So no I don't see much skewed there with 4 out of 6 drivers struggling. Certainly not compared with Toyota where basically everyone who drove it was fast out of the box and similar with Fiesta at start.

Neuville's effect at Hyundai has been that the car wasn't changed "cause Neuville is fast with it". In 2017 Neuville even made comments about his teammates on that. For Loeb there were also interviews with Adamo about it. Is that Neuville's fault? Not really, more the team leadership fault, which imo was one of the main reasons they didn't win manu title in 2017 and 2018. First big changes started to appear mid 2019.

Does that meant Neuville is "bad"? No, it might actually mean the opposite, that Neuville is too good to adapt to something that is flawed. But his ability to drive fast anyway couldn't do miracles in places like Finland and certainly couldn't make other drivers in the team perform better for manu champ.