Passau, Germany Thierry Neuville can finally clinch his first World Rally driver title at 36 on Sunday in the season’s penultimate Central European Rally after a long and bumpy 15-year ride that has repeatedly highlighted the Belgian’s dogged determination.

Near misses

Neuville made his debut at the Rally of Catalunya at the end of the 2009, aged 21. He did not finish. After starting as a privateer, followed by a spell with Citroen, he joined the Qatar rally team. 

In 2013, he recorded his first podium, finishing the season with four second places and three thirds, and as a distant runner-up in the standings behind his nemesis Sebastien Ogier. Neuville switched to Hyundai in 2014 and recorded his first win in Germany.

Between 2016 and 2019 he was runner-up every season, three times to Ogier, and then to Ott Tanak. After dropping to fourth in the Covid-curtailed 2020 season, he was third the last three years. His five overall runners-up finishes are a WRC record. 

His 21 victories, going into this weekend’s rally, place him eighth all time, but the seven drivers ahead of him, as well as the two on 20 victories, had all won driver titles. Leading Hyundai to their first two constructors titles, in 2019 and 2020, can hardly have been much consolation.

Persistance

A long career as a ‘nearly man’ might have been dispiriting, but on the road Neuville has always shown a determination to keep going, racing on after crashes or after changing his own wheel on the course.

Thierry Neuville’s Hyundai crashes off the road in Chile in 2019In 2014, in the shakedown ahead of the Germany Rally, he came off the road and rolled down the steep vineyard cutting a swathe through vines heavy with ripening grapes. He turned the bitter taste of that disaster into a spray of champagne as won the race for his first victory. 

The same season, after coming to a halt in the Mexican heat, he grabbed a huge plastic bottle of beer from a spectator and poured it into his damaged radiator. He finished third. 

In 2022, in Croatia, after his car was stopped by an alternator problem, Neuville and co-driver Martijn Wydaeghe pushed the car the last 800m to reach the service park. He received a 40-second penalty for arriving late. 

To add insult to injury, he was simultaneously fined for speeding between stages earlier in the day, when he was clocked at 156kph on an 80kph road. He still finished third.

First Belgian

While Belgium has produced champions in other motor sports, notably Jacky Ickx, Belgian-born Max Verstappen and former world speed record holder Camille Jenatzy, Neuville would be the country’s first rally champion. 

Thierry Neuville heading for victory in the Acropolis Rally in SeptemberOnly Francois Duval, who won once, in Australia in 2005, has even topped the podium in a rally. 

Neuville is from St Vith in the east of the country and while his name might sound French, he belongs to the one per cent of the Belgian population that speaks German as a first language.