WRC Champion gives verdict on MotoGP: “They have a bit more safety areas”

2024 WRC Champion Thierry Neuville says he was impressed by the speed of MotoGP when he visited the final round of the 2025 season in Valencia.

Neuville, who has been a part of Hyundai’s WRC project since its first year in 2014 and who has been sponsored by Red Bull for much of his career, was in Valencia with the Red Bull KTM Factory Racing squad for the final round of the 2025 MotoGP World Championship, where Diogo Moreira was crowned Moto2 World Champion and Marco Bezzecchi beat Raul Fernandez to victory in the MotoGP battle.

The straight line performance was the standout attribute of the premier class machines for Neuville, whose i20 Rally1 is geared to top out at around 190kph, or around 120mph, compared to the 366kph (227mph) that still stands as the MotoGP speed record achieved by KTM’s Brad Binder at Mugello in 2023.

“It’s different,” Neuville said, speaking to DirtFish during recce for Rally Saudi Arabia, whose inaugural edition this weekend (26–29 November) closes the 2025 World Rally Championship..

“For sure, the shocks go straight into the body. 

“They have a bit more safety areas before they get hit, that’s for sure. 

“But it was impressive: the bikes are really impressive, the speed they can go in a straight line – it’s not so fast in corners, but on straight line it’s really impressive.”

The other thing that stood out to Neuville about MotoGP was the size of the riders.

“I saw that they are all 1.55m, all very small,” he joked.

It was put to him that he himself is probably too tall to be a MotoGP rider, and Neuville joked that also his slightly shorter co-driver, Martijn Wydaeghe, might also not have the physical qualities required.

“So, Martijn [Wydaeghe] is probably missing the muscles,” Neuville joked.

“Still, I would say he is too tall. The guys were all really, really small.”

Neuville’s 2025 WRC season has been his first in WRC as a defending champion, having begun his top-flight career with Citroen in 2012. He is yet to win a rally this season, and is mathematically out of title contention ahead of the final rally in Saudi Arabia.

The title battle, instead, will be played between points leader Elfyn Evans; eight-time World Champion Sebastien Ogier; and 2022 and 2023 World Champion Kalle Rovanpera, for whom Saudi Arabia is the final rally of his WRC career before he moves to circuit racing full-time in 2026 with the support of Toyota in the Japanese Super Formula series.