The team principal of Hyundai Motorsport, Cyril Abiteboul, says that his team has detected two weaknesses on the i20N and is trying to find a solution before the start of the new WRC season, but he says that it will be difficult considering how narrow is the operating window.
The Alzenau-based team managed to increase its gap from the second Toyota from one to twenty points at the end of Rally Finland, but Thierry Neuville, Ott Tanak and Esapekka Lappi were struggling with the balance of the i20N in the stages. More specifically, Neuville and Lappi said that the i20N was unstable on low grip conditions and could not get the feeling to push, but also it must be mentioned that Hyundai is always struggling in Finland while Tanak became the first Hyundai driver who won this event back in 2022. Furthermore, another weakness of the car is the overweight which means that the i20N is slower in the acceleration than the Yaris and the Puma, but the team is working very hard to solve the problems that were detected, such as the driveshaft issues. Last but not least, its rival teams gave the green light to Hyundai to use some additional jokers in order to develop further the i20N ahead of 2025 as M-Sport Ford and Toyota feared that Hyundai may exit World Rally Championship due to the fact that FIA was thinking of changing the current regulations for next year.
"We have a car that is suffering two things, first it is quite peaky", Abiteboul said.
"The operating window of whatever set up is very narrow and when we have stable condition, it can be all good, all nice, from Thursday shakedown to Sunday evening or whatever the end of the rally, but in a rally like this one where the conditions are almost changing by corner it doesn't work, it simply does not work.
"In slippery conditions we are not quite as stable as benchmark, which for me is the Toyota.
"I think it's clear that we've got some work to do again.
"First, finding a wider operating window and secondly, work on low grip conditions.
"Some of that we are trying to address is in what we have in the pipeline for next year's car, but some of that is still not totally addressed, but we are making big efforts.
"We have got some tests that are planned in order to try to bring some solution to those problems".
Source: Motorsport.com
Photo Credits: Hyundai
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