The technical director of Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, Tom Fowler, says that Elfyn Evans managed to continue on Saturday in Greece after his radiator issue by switching to EV mode, but excludes the possibility of fitting a new engine to his driver's Yaris.
The Welshman dropped from fourth to fifth place overall at the end of Stage 9 as he lost more than one minute to complete the final stage of Saturday morning due to the fact that the radiator of his car was broken and was a leakage coming from it. The first thing that Evans did is to switch off the ICE and to drive on EV mode for the rest of SS9 resulting in cooling down the engine as the oil temperature was high. He managed to return back to the service park and his mechanics fixed his car for the afternoon with six stages remaining until the finale of Acropolis Rally. Finally, he did the 1-2 for Toyota in Greece last weekend and finished behind his championship rival Kalle Rovanpera which means it is still game on on WRC title bid as their gap is at 33 points before the start of Rally Chile.
"There was a combination of factors there", Fowler said.
"The system in the car that detects this kind of leak activated really effectively, so Elfyn and Scott were given the information really early that effectively the car has informed them their radiator is leaking.
"OK, there’s a number of other options as to what this fault could be but effectively they will know that this is likely what’s happened, and they are well trained to understand what that means in terms of a response.
"And there’s a sequence of things which they can do, and the car will do itself.
"Probably the most important one in the end was Elfyn’s decision to stop the engine and use the hybrid, as you mentioned.
"So he used the EV to get to the end of the stage which certainly gave him some space to keep the engine temperature down, which was really important not only for his rally but for the season in terms of costs.
"We are restricted to two engines for the year for a region, so to expire an engine for such a simple radiator issue is obviously not financially a great option".
Source: DirtFish.com
Photo Credits: Toyota
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