The team principal of Hyundai Motorsport, Cyril Abiteboul, says that his team will use more jokers this year in order to make some improvements to the new i20N as Toyota and M-Sport Ford gave the green light to them to move on.
FIA made a serious announcement on February 28 after the World Motor Council which is related to the future of World Rally Championship. More specifically, the hybrid units will be removed from the current Rally1 cars at the end of 2024 while there will be a reduction on the air restrictor and the aerodynamics from 2025. In addition to these, they have proposed some cost cap measures including the number of engines that a driver can use during a season, but they have not decided the new regulations for 2027 or car specifications for 2025 yet as it is speculated that the next generation will be Rally1 minor cars or Rally2 plus cars. However, it must be mentioned that the next World Motor Council will be held in June and Hyundai has already spent its jokers before the next homologation window opens as the Korean team found a solution to the main weakness of the i20N which is related to the overweight. More details about the new i20N have not been confirmed yet and it is unknown if the Hyundai drivers have already tested it with the intention of giving to the mechanics feedback ahead of the new season.
"Before anything, we have to wait until June to see what the concept will be from World Motor Sport Council", Abiteboul said.
"I think the biggest weakness we have and we wanted to sort out is actually on reliability and on the setup of the car.
"I don’t want to go too much into the detail, but reliability is still a question here and it can hit at any point – as we saw in Kenya.
"It can happen again.
"Unfortunately, we have not brought any fix to that.
"So that’s something that hopefully will be fixed and the setup of the car is something that will be partly fixed with the joker system.
"I’d say we’ll be able to probably do, what… 50% of what we wanted to do with the new car.
"That will be a way for everyone, not just us.
"We all have ideas and we are stuck in not being able to implement without using jokers.
"So, yes, we will be able to do some of the things that we’d like to do.
"It’s not the complete set of measures that we wanted to do –we had a different project of a new car and that’s no comparison to what we will be able to do with those jokers".
Source: DirtFish.com
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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