What being World Rally champion means to Neuville – DirtFish

The intensity of this day, I mean, how bonkers was it?
It was tough. I mean, not only this day, the whole season has been tough. I mean, for several reasons, and we know the reasons. But I have to say that, yeah, coming here, we had a quite nice advantage, the plan was clear but the plan got completely messed up after three stages when the turbo failed and basically, yeah, emotions went in all the directions but again we kept calm, we stayed positive and we fight back once again. We stand up, we fight back.

We came into the points on Saturday which was not really expected, at least not for P7, and this morning, 8.15am or something, we got world champion, which was even less expected, at least not that fast. So yeah, lots of emotions. It has been in all directions this weekend, because obviously we didn’t achieve the manufacturers at the end of the day. But yeah, so we have been living all kinds of emotions this weekend.

Talk us through that moment when you actually found out. How did you find out and what was it like?
I was changing a tire and I got a call from my assistant Florian who never calls me, never. And I didn’t think a second that he called me to tell me that we were world champion, but when I took off the phone I heard the ambience behind and obviously he just threw the message in ‘you are world champion’ and I say ‘OK, OK’ and now and I say ‘but you are sure? ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah Ott went off.’ I said ‘OK that’s not good, obviously because for the manufacturer it was a disaster’. And then I say ‘OK let’s stay focused’, and I say ‘Martijn we are world champion’ and then we obviously gave a hug and then we say ‘what we do now? We stay focused. Now we go all in for the team. They deserve it. So we’re going to try as hard as we can’.