Recency bias makes troubleshooting Hyundai’s final round collapse in the World Rally Championship manufacturers’ title race slightly complicated.
It would be easy to look at Ott Tänak’s final day crash in Japan, which cost Hyundai a minimum of 18 points, as the main reason for the capitulation to Toyota. But as team principal Cyril Abiteboul highlighted in the immediate aftermath of Hyundai’s loss: “A race season is so much more complex than that.”
Indeed it is. Again, as Abiteboul highlighted, Toyota had cast off a boatload of points Hyundai’s way: Finland, where both Evans and Rovanperä crashed on the final day, was one of several cases where the GR Yaris Rally1 armada suddenly found themselves shipwrecked.
Looking closer at how the manufacturers’ title evolved over the course of the season, it becomes apparent that Hyundai failed to play its strongest hand. The driver who helped it win both its manufacturers’ titles in the past was left home far too often – Dani Sordo.
Sordo only contested three events from 13 this season
Hyundai ended up leaning on Thierry Neuville as something of a crutch in its bid for the makes’ race. The numbers behind his contribution to his team’s points haul highlight why: out of the 39 opportunities to score points across the season (the Saturday classification, Sunday classification and powerstage across 13 events), Neuville contributed to Hyundai’s haul on 36 occasions. That’s a hit rate of 92.3% – the next-best in that regard in 2024 was Sébastien Ogier on 73.3%.
The reasons Neuville’s consistency in delivering points to Hyundai’s team-wide haul occurred is two-fold. It was the same story in the drivers’ championship – every time he had a bad opener, he would more often than not follow up by smashing it on Sunday. But the other reason is an indictment on the the third car – it didn’t act as a reliable enough insurance policy during the year.
On paper Sordo delivered the least. Looping back to that opportunities to score metric, the three-time WRC event winner only went two for nine – a hit rate of 22.2%. But there’s good reason why despite this, he outscored fellow Hyundai part-timers Andreas Mikkelsen and Esapekka Lappi on average.
Sordo was brought to only three rallies all season – the technical and often rougher gravel stages of Portugal, Sardinia and Greece. His two contributions to Hyundai’s manufacturers’ championship efforts were 13 points on the opening two days of Sardinia, and 15 after Saturday’s action in Greece.
But here’s the thing: he did the job required of him each time. In Portugal, he was line-astern with his team-mates by the end of Saturday, sitting in fourth place and 14.2s behind Neuville as Tänak battled Ogier for the lead. Had either full-time driver binned it on Sunday, Sordo would have picked up the pieces and ensured Hyundai scored the same number of points regardless.
When Neuville went off the road in Italy, Sordo was there to pick up the pieces and grab the same number of points his team-mate had conceded with his trip down a ditch. On Sundays he scored nothing – but with Neuville and Tänak opening the taps and trying to top up their drivers’ championship accounts, he didn’t need to.
Compare this to Lappi and Mikkelsen. In Sweden, Lappi followed through as needed: he banked 18 points and then cruised to the finish while his team-mates focused on bouncing back on Super Sunday. Latvia was a disaster: he had optimal road position yet was bereft of pace, which subsequently ruined his road position for the rest of the rally and left him lagging behind first-on-the-road Neuville before a last-stage retirement from engine problems. Chile was more of the same: he was last of the Rally1 cars that hadn’t crashed out and then retired before the final stage from self-inflicted car damage.
Mikkelsen meanwhile was sent to the wrong places: he was completely lost trying to make sense of his new steed in the French Alps, unable to tame the i20 N Rally1 beast on Monte asphalt. It was a similar story in Croatia, picking up four Sunday points after Neuville’s off-road trip on the final morning. The only time all season he put up double digits was Poland, his one gravel appearance. He’d actually been able to leverage his road position and fight Rovanperä for victory until a trip off-road damaged his i20 on the final day and left him preserving the 15 points he’d picked up the day before.
Sordo didn't get as many opportunities to sit in the cockpit as he perhaps should've
All the while, Sordo was wondering when he’d set foot in the cockpit again. After his Sardinia outing, he was bemused by the lack of clarity on what came next. He asked, bordering on pleading, to get a proper send-off. He didn’t want Sardinia to be his last event. It wasn’t – and it shouldn’t be Acropolis 2024 either.
Hyundai had somehow forgotten the secret weapon in its arsenal that delivered manufacturers’ titles in 2019 and 2020. In the former, Sordo put points on the board for Hyundai in eight of the nine rallies he contested, including a shock win in Sardinia. But 2020 is where his output became truly decisive: ending the season with a win and a third place meant despite the drivers’ title being a two-horse race between Toyota’s lead pair, Hyundai was able to retain the teams’ crown. And let’s not forget that run of five podiums in a row from 2021-2022 despite being a part-timer.
Monte Carlo, Croatia, Central Europe, Japan: these were all chances to have the world’s best insurance policy sat in the third Hyundai. Sordo prides himself on not making careless mistakes: his Japan 2023 retirement was rather unlucky considering the deluge that preceded his aquaplaning into a ditch and his last unforced error that led to a retirement before that was Safari 2021.
Hopefully Sordo gets one last rally (or more?) to sign off a career that finally appears to be drawing to a close. Though he won’t bow out with a drivers’ title to his name, he can rightfully claim to be a key proponent of two manufacturers’ crowns for Hyundai (and several more at Citroën) – but it quite possibly should have been three, had he been afforded the chance to make a difference more often this season.
