  We present a self-consistent, relativistic model of rapidly rotating neutron
stars describing their exterior gravitational field. This is achieved by
matching the new solution of Einstein's field equations found by Manko et al.
(2000) and the numerical results for the interior of neutron stars with
different equations of state calculated by Cook et al. (1994). This matching
process gives constraints for the choice of the five parameters of the vacuum
solution. Then we investigate some properties of the gravitational field of
rapidly rotating neutron stars with these fixed parameters.
