The FIA road director, Andrew Wheatley, says that the change on the WRC regulations will not affect the tyre development of Hankook for 2025 and they have already a solution on that.
Hankook won the FIA's tyre tender last December and scheduled its first tarmac test earlier this month with Andreas Mikkelsen, Elfyn Evans and Adrien Fourmaux before the start of Croatia Rally. World Rally Championship will change the current rules ahead of next season which will be announced in June when the next World Motor Council will take place. So far, it is known that the aerodynamics and the air restrictor will be reduced and the hybrid units will be removed from the current Rally1 cars, but it is yet to be confirmed if the new cars will switch to Rally1 minor or Rally2 plus cars for 2025. The main target of these changes is to attract more manufacturers to the championship as well as to decrease the cost as the price of the Rally1 cars is almost at 600.000 euros. Last but not least, Richard Millener, Cyril Abiteboul and Jari-Matti Latvala are pushing hard FIA to make an announcent on the new WRC regulations as soon as possible as eight months are remaining for the start of the new season.
"I think the tyre manufacturers are doing a great job to bridge that gap", Wheatley said.
"The tyre is designed to be fairly flexible.
"At the moment, one of the targets from Hankook is to make the tyre between Rally1 and Rally2 as close as possible.
"It might be that there are some changes on different surfaces, but I don't think it is in the discussion at the moment.
"First of all, the small detail changes can be applied quite quickly in terms of the development, and it is being designed with a fairly wide window.
"I think we have a solution for that, and it is not an issue".
Source: Motorsport.com
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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