Why was Thierry Neuville driving a Hyundai i20 N Rally2 in the French Alps on Wednesday? Simple: it was one small step backwards to take two – potentially significant – steps forward towards this month’s Monte Carlo Rally.
The Belgian has started the event 15 times, won it twice. But he’s only ever driven with Hankook tires once. Back in the days before testing restrictions became a thing, Hyundai and the rest of the factory manufacturers in the World Rally Championship would have set up camp in the mountains and gone in search of every condition.
They would then have driven every possible tire package in all those different conditions. Days and weeks later they would have emerged with data for every possible scenario and as clear a picture as possible about what lay ahead once they departed Casino Square bound for the snow, ice, rain and sunshine sitting on the Cols.
Now? Each driver gets a day. Maybe a day and a bit if you include running time for a media activation ahead of the start. Then you’re at it: it’s Thursday afternoon and your car controller is asking you if you want the wet, the dry, the stud or the snow tire for the road north to Gap?
While Neuville would prefer to be pounding out the miles in a Rally1 car, the priority is familiarisation with what’s sitting on all four corners.
Neuville would prefer to test a Rally1 all the time, but driving a Rally2 today was clever
“It’s easy to forget,” Hyundai’s sporting director Andrew Wheatley told DirtFish, “we had so much knowledge of the tires we were using before Hankook. We’d done thousands of kilometers on them in all conditions. We’re trying to rebuild that knowledge base with very limited testing available to us. We don’t have a second team, so we have to use what’s available to us.
“The Rally2 car is a very useful tool in that direction. Yes, it’s very different from the Rally1 car, but we’re not looking for the ultimate, ultimate performance. When it comes to testing the tires for Monte Carlo, we’re looking to understand where the trends are; we’re looking to understand where the periphery of the choices are. We’re not looking to say: ‘OK, at 0.2 of a bar pressure, there’s a difference between this and this.’
“We’re looking to understand what the difference is between studs and slicks. We’re looking to understand the matrix and that’s why Thierry is in the Rally2 car – and why all of our drivers for Monte will be in it.”
Wheatley added that tire testing in the slower of the two i20s brought a sharper focus on what’s going on with the Hankooks.
“Using the Rally2 car, the drivers will only be focused on the tires,” he said. “The driving is not an issue for them, they can drive up and down the same piece of road all day and they’re only thinking about what the tire’s doing and how it’s working in the conditions.”
So, we don’t need to be getting carried away with Neuville being in the Rally2 car then? This isn’t an early test with an eye to Hyundai’s 2027 entry?
“We will use every kilometer that we run in that car,” offered Wheatley. “We will get as much feedback for the ongoing development and evolution of the i20 N Rally2. When you have drivers like Thierry, Adrien [Fourmaux] and Hayden [Paddon] in [Rallye National Hivernal du] Dévoluy, we’re getting a lot of kilometers every day – you’re going to learn something from that time in the car.
“Everything we learn is being utilized to make the Rally2 car faster for the customers who are out there competing in these cars every weekend.”
