The technical director of Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, Tom Fowler, says that his team was in a hurry to prepare for the new WRC season as FIA changed the regulations at the last minute.
FIA announced new regulations ahead of the 2025 WRC season in which they made some significant changes. In fact, they removed the hybrid units from the Rally1 cars and made the air restrictor smaller meaning that the team had to do some adjustments to the engine parts, such as to the camshafts. All the WRC teams had six to eight weeks to bring some upgrades to their cars for the 2025 WRC season, thus the mechanics worked very hard in order to have everything prepared for Rallye Monte Carlo.
"The important thing from the team is that we found out with a maximum of six to eight weeks remaining that development had to change and we managed to do new camshafts, new exhaust manifold and five gear ratios in that time," Fowler said.
"It was a big collaboration between engine department, transmission department and supplier to make that happen.
"If you write down the time it takes to make those gears, make those manifold parts and to grind camshafts, if you use all the standard delivery times it is impossible, so we really had to pull some favours and tricks to get that done.
"It is testament to our engineers and our designers that it happened.
"If you have a smaller restrictor then your engine characteristics change mostly around the rev range, so it becomes more important to use the rpm lower than before which affects the tuning of the engine, so the engine jokers were changed at the last minute.
"We always have a new engine for Monte Carlo and we changed the development plan in October and November last year when the restrictor size was coming as news.
"We did some camshafts and an exhaust manifold which are tuned specifically for the new intake size.
"So that's two jokers on the engine for those parts.
"Then at the same time, we used a chassis joker to change the gear ratios in the gearbox and again that was a last-minute change as we are not planning to do that".
Source: Motorsport.com
Photo Credits: Toyota
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