Hyundai is aiming to avoid the same mistake it made with its Rally1 ‘evo’ package with the development of its i20 N Rally2.
The Korean marque’s future in the World Rally Championship is unclear, but it is homologating a raft of updates to its Rally2 machine for 2027.
The new car has been seen testing this week in Finland with Kris Meeke behind the wheel. Hayden Paddon is driving today (Wednesday) and tomorrow.
Hyundai is not expected to develop a kit for the car, meaning it will not compete in the Rally1 category next year.
The last time Hyundai released an update to any of its rally cars was 2025, when it introduced an ‘evo’ version of the i20 N Rally1.
Asked what changes will be made to the Rally2, Hyundai Motorsport president Cyril Abiteboul told DirtFish lessons would be learned from the Rally1 ‘evo’ update which he confessed was too radical.
“[It will be] quite some change, frankly,” said Abiteboul. “I mean our approach on that program was fairly radical.
“Let’s see to what extent it delivers because the program we had for the last three years in Rally1 was also quite radical and if anything maybe too radical, because I think we have in 2024 a rally winning and a championship contender car, and we move from that position to something that was a bit more challenging to say the least.
“So let’s see what we can do this time around with Rally2, but for sure the Rally2 has all the lessons and all the learnings that we had from this Rally1 program.”
The current i20 N Rally2 is known to be a stronger Tarmac car than gravel, with customer racing manager Benôit Nogier revealing in 2024 that full focus was on making the i20 a Tarmac machine.
The latest homologation will look to address that imbalance.
“It’s a bit of an all-round improvement, but I think it’s fair to say that we know that the car was very competitive already on Tarmac. So it’s clearly not in this area that we’ve been working,” Abiteboul added.
