Hyundai never planned to be in this championship position: 98 points adrift of Toyota, with its leading driver 42 points back in fifth.
But now in this situation, what’s key is that Hyundai doesn’t blow the opportunity it has before it.
Toyota’s five cars start next week’s Rally Portugal first, second, third, fourth and sixth, with Hyundai taking fifth, seventh and 10th in the running order.
Reigning world champion Sébastien Ogier starting behind Adrien Fourmaux (and trailing by just one point in the championship) isn’t ideal from a Hyundai perspective, but Dani Sordo as the second-to-last car is a very powerful weapon in its arsenal.
“I think we’ve got the pace to be able to fight with Toyota in Portugal,” sporting director Andrew Wheatley told DirtFish.
“We didn’t want this running order position that we’re going to have, this benefit that we’ll have, but we have a benefit going into the next rally, so we’re going to have to use it.
“Canaries has been about two things for us,” Wheatley added. “The first was minimum mistakes; absolutely trying to find minimum mistakes and the team’s done an incredible job. I don’t think we’ve lost any time on the event other than Adrian’s jumpstart, but we wanted to absolutely minimise mistakes and have 100% reliability.
“And the second thing was about making sure that Dani comes to Portugal with a whole rally under his belt, with good experience with his engineers, back into the team.
“It’s been a couple of years since he’s been in the team. It’s been a couple of years since he’s been fighting at WRC level and he jumped straight back in. So we’ve got those two positives which we can take to Portugal and hopefully we can have a fighting chance.”
Fourmaux has “100% optimism for Portugal” because “I know from last year that the car was performing well over there and we also did the test already before the Canaries and it was very positive”, but Thierry Neuville isn’t as confident.
“It will be tough,” said 2024’s champion. “Ogier is starting just in front of us, so I think it will be a tough target for us, but we will try. If we can confirm the good feeling, at least [what we had] from the pre-event test, it would be nice.”
Fourmaux wouldn’t reveal exactly what Hyundai had “found” with the car relative to last year, but acknowledged Toyota could have made a step forward too.
“We have found things but the teams are always improving. I’m sure Toyota have also found something new etc,” he said.
“But anyway, we know that we have made some improvements. Unfortunately, we have a better road position, at least on Friday, so let’s optimise it.”
