Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Thus, the World Rally Championship arrived in Matosinhos for the fifth round of its current season with a Toyota Yaris having won every Rally of Portugal since 2019.
Nothing in the performance of the teams, their driver line-ups or even the stages particularly looked different to years gone by and unsurprisingly the opening day’s action played out in a fairly monotonous manner.
As the points leader, first place on the road fell to Hyundai’s perennial talisman Thierry Neuville, which meant a day of damage limitation as his i20 was forced to plough through the deepest, softest dirt to clear a path for the cars behind.
It was a captain’s innings from the Belgian, the last man to win in Portugal without a Yaris
