The team principal of M-Sport Ford, Richard Millener, says that his team has the intention to make more improvements to the Fiesta Rally2 throughout this year which will be based on the feedback of two drivers.
The Cumbrian-based team announced Adrien Fourmaux and Gregoire Munster as its drivers for this year. The first one had a WRC programme in 2022 with M-Sport Ford, but the team decided to drop him to WRC2 class for 2023 after the crashes he had with the Puma. On the other hand, Munster renewed his contract for one more season, but it is yet to be confirmed from which rally he will start his campaign.
The second category of WRC is being expected to have high competition as Toksport will bring the brand-new Skoda Fabia RS Rally2 and Emil Lindholm will defend his 2022 title. Moreover, Teemu Suninen and Fabrizio Zaldivar will continue with Hyundai Motorsport N and will be behind the wheel of a i20N Rally2 whereas Citroen Racing confirmed that three drivers including Yohan Rossel will have WRC2 programmes in 2023. Last but not least, Toyota has already presented a concept car, GR Yaris Rally2, which may meke its debut from 2025 which means that it is important for M-Sport Ford to make further improvements to Fiesta Rally2 considering how many different car brans are involved to WRC2.
"Both Rally2s aren’t really as close as we’d have hoped", Millener said.
"Maybe we need to do a bit more setup work on these real dry conditions with that car.
"In the damp and wet conditions like we had in Jänner it’s great but on the real clean stuff we don’t seem to be as close.
"Last year we had a very minimal program with the car from our side.
"Customers were running it, but obviously the intention is to get back and try and have a go at the WRC2 championship.
"We’ve got Adrien in and Grégoire in; both of them can provide us with good feedback.
"So we’ve just got to take each rally at a time and I think it’s more the setups than necessarily the car, we’ve just got to fine-tune everything.
"Adrien is jumping back from Rally1 to Rally2 and you know what the competition’s like here – it’s incredible, so it’s not easy.
"We’ve got quite a bit of stuff still coming throughout the year so it’s not like we’re not developing at all,”
"We’d love it to be a Fiesta getting that attention but a good thing to say here is the technical regulations are obviously working very well".
Source: DirtFish.com
Photo Credits: M-Sport
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