Toyota surprised by driveshaft failure on Evans's car and will investigate it further

The technical director of Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, Tom Fowler, says that they were surprised by Elfyn Evans's driveshaft issue and will make a further investigation to understand the reason behind the failure as they know which car parts are unreliable.

Elfyn Evans was in second place overall at the end of Stage 11 and was fighting with Kalle Rovanpera for the win of Rally Finland, but the Welshman had a half spin in Stage 12 and dropped three places in that stage due to driveshaft issues with his Yaris. He and Scott Martin tried to repair their car for the longest stage of the rally, but eventually completed Stage 13 after four minutes resulting in finishing Saturday morning in eighth place. Moreover, his race worsened on Saturday afternoon as the Toyota mechanics had to change some parts on the exhaust system apart from the driveshaft which means that Evans left the service park with a 16-minute delay and received a 160-second time penalty. Finally, it must be mentioned that it was the first time that a Toyota driver faced a transmission failure compared to their rival team, Hyundai, which had been suffered from reliability issues due to the driveshaft.

"To be honest it’s a very disappointing situation because obviously a driveshaft is an assembly of many different pieces and the piece which we believe has caused the issue is something which would be a long, long, long way down our list of suspects of things that might bite us", Fowler said.

"I think I’ve discussed before about our reliability, that it falls into different categories, that some things are really inherently reliable in the car and they just run forever and other things we have to monitor and we have to check and we have to change more often and that’s how we control it.

"This falls into a part which we know is designed to be capable of all the scenarios that we expect it to see. 

"It didn’t see anything unusual and at the moment, it’s kind of a big surprise that this is exactly what happened.

"So we have to investigate why that is. 

"And of course, there can be numerous reasons from the manufacturing, from something that happened in the stage that we don’t know about yet or whatever.

"But we are very surprised that this particular part has done what it’s done".

Source: DirtFish.com

Photo Credits: Toyota