Heavy snow forces Hyundai to postpone Neuville Monte Carlo test

Heavy snowfall has forced Hyundai to postpone Thierry Neuville’s pre-event test ahead of the World Rally Championship season opener in Monte Carlo.

WRC teams have headed to the south of France this week to test in preparation for the annual asphalt curtain raiser to be held from 22-25 January.

While Toyota began testing on Tuesday with Elfyn Evans and Oliver Solberg running in largely dry conditions, snow has swept into the region today forcing Hyundai to abandon its Rally1 pre-event test for Neuville.

Hyundai had kicked off its testing programme on Wednesday with Adrien Fourmaux behind the wheel while Hayden Paddon is expected to jump in the car on Friday.

Neuville attempted several runs in the heavy snow but the conditions were too severe to conduct any meaningful testing. Tractors fitted with snow ploughs were called upon to help clear the snow from the roads before a decision was made to abandon the day.

“We can believe we are in Sweden or Finland and that we are preparing for Rally Sweden but this is absolutely not the case. We have the winter conditions today,” said Neuville on Instagram.

“One might think that is quite good because these are the conditions we hope to have for the rally, but the past proves that it's been a long time since we’ve had the conditions so it’s not the conditions optimal for us today that’s not what we were looking for either.”

In another Instagram post Neuville confirmed that the FIA has given Hyundai permission to reschedule the test for later in the week, with Sunday the most likely date.

“As you can see it is still snowing, we even tried to get the snow ploughs through to try and clear a little bit the big layer of snow but despite everything it's not improved,” he added.

“The snow continues to fall so we decided to cancel the day. The FIA has also given us permission to postpone the day to the end of the week.

“Unfortunately not the day we had hoped for, we’ll test again by the end of the week. I hope to do the necessary work that we had planned to do with more stable conditions to be able to compare the evolutions we wanted to try.”