Hyundai team principal Andrea Adamo has laughed off suggestions Jari Huttunen’s car gained a performance advantage from a transmission part that did not comply with homologation on February’s Rally Sweden World Rally Championship round.
The Finn won the WRC 3 category aboard an i20 R5, but was then hit with a €10,000 fine (€5000 of which was suspended) by the stewards of the Torbsy-based event after post-event scrutineering revealed the non-compliance of the left-side driveshaft. The shafts on the car were found to be outside the permitted tolerances.
Despite Sweden being almost two months ago, there are still rumblings of discontent among some competitors.
Adamo has sought to set them straight.
“This is bulls***,” he told DirtFish. “I’m glad people have time to sit and think about these things. Let me say it this way: if you have something bigger than it should be, normally it’s heavier.
“Some people are so silly. The situation is very straightforward. Our supplier has made a mistake when they changed the plan of production and they underestimated the tolerances of our drawings.
“Honestly, we should have checked internally, but as the supplier is a well-known company, we trusted their quality certification and we shouldn’t have done.
“In reality, there was a batch of 20 driveshafts which are slightly bigger – one tenth [of a millimeter] in diameter – with respect to the homologated dimensions with tolerances. Rightly, the stewards fined us because we made a mistake. But this did not [positively] affect the performance of the car.
“Like I told you, this is bulls***. But it’s interesting that people are watching more what Hyundai is doing – it shows that we are becoming a threat.”
