The team principal and the CEO of Hyundai Motorsport, Cyril Abiteboul, admits that his team felt that they had a disadvantage since the start of Rally Finland and were anxious about Toyota's domination, but they played the long game and remained focused until the end of the event.
From the opening day of Rally Finland, the Toyota drives (Kalle Rovanpera, Elfyn Evans and Sebastien Ogier) showed their domination very early while Hyundai looked to have a disadvantage after Ott Tanak's retirement in Stage due to a crash. Moreover, Thierry Neuville was starting first on the road on Friday in an event which is not one of his favorites due to the fact that he struggles on the fast gravel rallies. As a consequence of these, Hyundai had hopes that Esapekka Lappi would be able to fight with the frontrunners as he was fourth overall until Stage 6 where the rear suspension of his i20N was damaged in a rut resulting in going straight and clipping a tree. EP had to retire in Stage 6 as the front right suspension was also damaged after his incident with the tree, thus Hyundai had only Neuville fighting until the end of Friday. Lappi restarted on Saturday under the SuperRally regulations, but he had to stop and to change a puncture on the first and on the second pass from Ouninpojha stage. Rovanpera and Ogier did the 1-2 for Toyota at the end of Saturday as Evans was dropped outside the top ten after the transmission issue with his Yaris in Stage 12. However, misfortune hit Toyota on Sunday as Rovanpera and Evans crashed in Stage 19 of Rally Finland meaning that only Ogier had the chance to score points for the manufacturers' championship whereas Hyundai collected 15 points from Neuville's second place on Saturday classification and 18 points from SuperSunday and from Powerstage, thus the Alzenau-based team managed to increase his lead from one to twenty points at the end of Rally Finland.
"We were obviously quite anxious coming into Finland, Toyota’s home event, their five cars and their excellent preparation here", Abiteboul said.
"It was, as we expected, a challenge and we were clearly on the backfoot for the weekend from the very start, and things went from bad to worse with the loss of Ott and Martin’s car.
"The rest of the weekend was looking like it was going to be very difficult for us to come away with anything positive, but we managed to stay focused, play the long game and work with setups to try and mitigate our loss with the Sunday points.
"Sunday’s circumstances clearly helped, but we managed to give Thierry and EP what they needed to put the pressure on their opponents.
"We came away extending our lead in all three championships.
"The summer break is very welcomed, and we look forward to the last part of the season to try and consolidate these positions".
Photo Credits: Hyundai
Post a Comment