Hyundai needs to improve its “peaky” car

They were smiles very much born from long faces.

Secto Rally Finland may later be reflected upon as a decisive swing in Hyundai’s favor in the battle for both 2024 World Rally Championship titles, but for the vast majority of last week it was Toyota on top.

Hyundai wasn’t even on top of its own car.

Kalle Rovanperä’s shock exit from the lead and Elfyn Evans’ driveshaft problem handed Thierry Neuville a second placed finish, but the championship leader made it clear “it’s the first race of the season where we’re really lacking performance”.

Throughout the weekend the Belgian “turned the car upside down” in search of a better feeling and more performance but to no avail, as he admitted driving some of Finland’s classic stages was “scary” as a result.

“Somehow something is missing. Where it failed, I don’t know,” Neuville told DirtFish.

“I mean, there’s a lot of things where we can point on, but we need to properly analyze first of all. It looks like all three drivers were missing the confidence and the feeling to attack.

“And as soon as we tried, there were mistakes. We saw it with EP, we saw it with Ott. And somehow, I was clever enough to not try too much.”

Team-mate Esapekka Lappi’s true potential was masked by his unscheduled meeting with the side of a tree on Friday afternoon, but he felt the car was “not really working” in Finland either.

“Our car needs consistent grip and then it works, but now it’s far away from consistent,” he told DirtFish, although the Finn did small improvements throughout the weekend.

Lappi feels Hyundai needs to work on its transmission, but the overall conclusion from management was that the i20 N Rally1 has become too peaky and needs to have a larger operating window.

“I think we simply are facing here two different facets of our car,” team principal Cyril Abiteboul told DirtFish.

“The first one is that I think that we have a car that is quite peaky. So when you find a setup, it’s really a setup for a particular condition. It works when conditions are stable, but you see here where the grip level is changing by corner, every corner. One corner the setup is good, the next corner it’s not good.

“So I think that’s something we need to find a solution for, is to open the sort of operating window of the setup that we have.

“The second thing is the overall grip level when the grip position is very low. We see that we have something that is not quite giving the confidence to the drivers. That’s something that we’ve been dragging on since basically this car has been introduced.

“I would be lying if I was saying that we have all the answers to these two questions, but at least the two questions are very clear. We have some tests that are planned, and Ott is actually pushing hard in those two directions actually, so that’s good. So it’s not a surprise.

“You come to an event, you always want to hope for something better. But frankly, if we are realistic, what we are facing is not something that is unexpected or also non-deserved because yes, we’ve been working hard, but in truth, we’ve not been coming with the solution that we need for that type of event.”

Abiteboul isn’t promising that a solution will be found in time for events like Chile later in the year either.

“It’s difficult because you know the regulation, you know that there is homologation, there is also a time period where you can homologate, that any new homologation out of session is taking time, there is administrative procedures that we need to follow. So if I’m very honest, the car in relation to those issues is likely to be very similar,” he said.

“So I think it’s one of the things, I mean we have to accept it. That’s also why we have to work with the assumption that we should plan for the worst in Chile. That’s why any buffer that we may have to the championship will be very welcome.

“That’s why also sometimes you need to play the long game, be patient, accept to lose a little bit in order to gain more later.”